


Square Peg

by neensz



Series: Epic X-over [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Leverage, Psych, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M, Feelings, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stupid Boys, feelings are hard, suprise family, talking is hard too, tiny Farscape fusion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-03-01
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-20 21:33:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 116,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/892126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neensz/pseuds/neensz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the sequel to (the sequel to) Full Circle, our heroes find that while the problems in the Pegasus galaxy are much different than those of Earth, they're also surprisingly similar.</p><p>Shawn adjusts (eventually) to his new life on Atlantis, Eliot discovers the benefits of communication, John realizes that what he had before isn't worth rejecting what he might be able to have now, Jesse makes some new friends, and Major Morris proves that what other people see is only 10% of the iceberg lurking beneath.</p><p>***</p><p>Still a WIP, and back on hiatus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which John embraces his inner adolescent

**Author's Note:**

> A/N July 2015: FIVE YEARS, it's been, since I posted Full Circle on LJ, and this threequel is still a WIP. I won't promise an end date, because I'm sick of failing to come through on it, but I can say that it is my Waterloo, and I am stubborn. It's gonna happen.
> 
> Especially since I just got the "surprise! You have ADHD and have likely had it since always, here are some drugs to make your life easier!" diagnosis at 30 years old, after ~10 years of college, and have since realized I'm neither lazy nor stupid. It's like a new lease on life. None of this is relevant, really, except that my ability to concentrate has skyrocketed, so I expect that my preoccupation with this 'verse may soon bear fruit. 
> 
> (And keep a lookout for Major Morris (and his cracky backstory--though, honestly, not much more cracky than the rest of all this). I'm tired of excluding him from the fun. He's getting written back in. Basically, in my head!canon, all my fandoms live in the same universe. Restricting them to their own is difficult, and crossovers are the best part of fanfiction, IMO. JSYK.)
> 
> A/N August 2015: OH LOOK I MADE CHAPTERS!!!!

JOHN

Most of the personnel sent to Atlantis were tenderized by the SGC hammer beforehand (unlike John), taught and trained and introduced to all the weird shit by the people who’d been doing it for the past ten years (or so).  (The military, anyway.  The scientists all seemed pretty kosher with it all regardless, probably because they were all operating on no sleep and pure caffeine 99% of the time.)  It was rare that Atlantis would get assigned military personnel that were gate-virgins, but it had happened.  Three times, actually.  The first was John.  The third was Corporal Spencer.  The second was Major Drake Morris.

It really pissed him off that Morris was so good at his job (and that Morris hadn’t gone through the _Holy shit!  Aliens!_ phase John and Eliot both had), though he tried not to admit it, not even to himself, because being angry that Morris fit Atlantis and did an exemplary job was the same as wangsting over the fact that he wasn’t special anymore, and John had already been through puberty once, thanks, and didn’t need to experience any of that again.  He couldn’t help feeling like the awkward 14-year old loner again though, sitting in an Ancient version of an overstuffed arm chair (one of the scientists had theorized they were made of some sort of pliable nanite-metal-polymer, which was why all the furniture had lasted for so long, and no one had sat down for a week) off to the side and watching his old team joke and laugh their way through a re-showing of Episode 4 ( _not_ the remastered version, thanks very much) with Major Morris, feeling like a goddamned fifth wheel.  He used to be the one who shared the in-jokes with them, where one person only had to say, “And the- the _tree_!” and three people snickered while the fourth blushed or argued, the things that were never funny when explained to someone who hadn’t been on that mission.  

They were still laughing, and John shot Ronon a quick, open grin when the big guy skewered him with a perceptive glance; Ronon wasn’t fooled though, he never was.  People always thought the big guy was dumb because he didn’t say much, but John had learned better.  Ronon was scary good at reading things people never wanted known, and just as good at pretending he couldn’t, until you were drunk off your ass with him at the 15,726th  harvest festival and confessed some deep dark secret and he just looks at you and says simply, “Yup,” with no surprise or anything, just like you were confirming something you’d already told him earlier.

It was only John’s second day of being the active commanding officer of Atlantis while not being officially assigned to AR-1.  He hated it so much he felt it as physical pain.  It’d been easier when he’d come back from retirement and left Jesse on Earth with Eliot because it was just one crisis after another and he’d worked with McKay and Teyla and Ronon like usual, only noticing the extra soldier tagging along after them in a peripheral way because he’d had other things on his mind, like keeping Atlantis from blowing up and not being drained to a withered husk by the Wraith that’d managed to infiltrate the city.  And then there’d been that thing with Jesse, and then the Wraith were being quiet so the Odyssey had stood guard over the galaxy while Atlantis was granted a six-month leave to Earth for repairs and most of the personnel had been on mandatory leisure shore-leave for that time, including John.  

So today was really the first time it’d hit home, the fact he wasn’t a part of his team anymore, when he’d sent AR-1 through the gate in search of something McKay and the rest of the science department desperately needed for some reason John hadn’t paid attention to, just like he’d never paid attention to the reasoning behind requests for gate travel before.  (If McKay spent less than five minutes trying to convince John, it really was a priority.  If he went on for over half an hour, it was just something he had a hunch about or that the science team wanted but didn’t need, so he didn’t even really have to listen to what McKay was saying, just surreptitiously time him.  (If it was urgent, they went, no matter what.  If not, they went if John could fit it into the ‘gate schedule.)  There hadn’t yet been a request for gate travel that had landed in the no-man’s-land of roughly eight to 27 minutes, and John had a pretty respectable sample size by now.)  AR-1’s mission had been a success (hence the movie-night celebration) in that they’d made tentative plans to negotiate with a potential new trading partner and that no one had been killed, injured, shot at, kidnapped, drugged, gotten married or proposed to anyone (on either side of the negotiations), and a failure in that they hadn’t found the wunder-tech McKay had been looking for.  It was the same old thing, except now John was on the outside looking in.

After a few more minutes of torture, he made his excuses and used Jesse as a get out of jail free card.  Ronon, however, was apparently not the only one who’d seen through him.  A little over half an hour later, after checking on Jesse to legitimize his excuse (sleeping soundly in his room, twitching with puppy dreams and clutching his threadbare bear so hard it was a wonder the stuffing hadn’t fallen out yet; normal Jesse night-time behavior), John found himself actually catching up on his paperwork, sitting on the couch with the balcony doors open for the night breeze, when his door-chime went off.  He didn’t check with Atlantis to see who was at the door before opening it, because after his abrupt departure he expected he’d have to explain himself to either Teyla or Ronon (McKay probably hadn’t even noticed he’d left), but that wasn’t who he opened the door to.

Major Morris was standing stiffly at attention outside his door, and John just blinked at him in confusion (and a little annoyance) for a moment.  “Relax, Major.  What’s up?”  He finally asked when Morris kept staring a little past him and not saying anything.  He figured someone would have got him on the radio if something had happened, and his radio was making the quiet soft static sound (he’d quickly learned to ignore it and it didn’t bug the hell out of him anymore) that meant it was on and functioning properly.

“Sir,” the marine finally met his eyes, and seemed to be considering his next words carefully.  “Permission to speak freely?”

John blinked.  Rolled his eyes.  Sighed.  And when none of those got Morris to retract his question, John capitulated.  “Fine,” he agreed evenly, and stood back to wave Morris into his quarters.  When a soldier asked you if he (or she) could speak freely, it generally meant they were gonna say something best not said in the hall where everyone could hear it, in John’s experience (from both sides of it).  Morris seemed a little startled at the invitation, but came in anyway, and took a seat in one of the armchairs when John waved him at it and sat back down on the couch.  “What is it, Morris?  Medicals came back with something hinky from the post-mission after all?”

Morris coughed into his fist, probably hiding a laugh.   _Hilarious, Major,_ John thought sourly, _Let’s turn you into a bug and see how funny you think it is then, shall we?_ Sometimes (all the time) he wished that mission report wasn’t part of the required reading packet for personnel new to Atlantis.  

“No, sir,” Morris answered after ‘clearing his throat’, “I was just wondering if you had a problem with me, sir,” he half-asked, half-stated in that strange accent John could never pin down.  The Major’s consonants were clipped enough to almost sound as British as Grodin had, but that was the only similarity Morris’s accent shared with the British accents John had heard.  Though, come to think of it, he sounded an awful lot like England’s new Prime Minister, the one who’d just come into office, so maybe Morris was British after all.  Definitely not Scottish, he didn’t sound anything like Carson, and John had plenty of recent experience to make sure—the SGC had managed to lure Dr. Beckett (2.0) back to the CMO position on Atlantis, as John had found out yesterday as they lined up for the dial-out to Atlantis.

“No, no problem,” John lied absent-mindedly—of course he had a problem, but it wasn’t the Major’s fault he’d been the one tapped to take up the slack when John had taken early retirement, and most of the time John even knew that.  “Where are you from, Major?” he finally asked, the question of Morris’s accent’s origin suddenly more important than John’s communion with his wangsty inner adolescent.  

Morris narrowed his eyes at John in what appeared to be confusion, sitting a little forward in his chair.  “I’m English,” he said slowly, as if he was worried his commanding officer had suddenly started exhibiting signs of outside/Ancient/alien/nanite influence.  “I’m your military liaison with the U.K.”

John blinked.  Huh.  That’s probably something he should have known.  Then again, he’d really only been here, paperwork wise, a few days, so maybe he could cut himself some slack on that.  “So, you’re not a Major, then, you’re a, a, what is it?  A Corporal?”  

Morris eyed him with what looked like surprise.  “No, sir,” he answered slowly, “I’m U.S.M.C., not Royal.  Moved to the States when I was 17, joined up then.  Colonel Donalson appointed me the liaison because ‘I spoke the same language,’ sir, not because I’m a Royal Marine.”  His impression of Donalson’s thick West Virginian accent was actually pretty good, John admitted, even though he’d only met the man a few times during the crisis-cascade the SGC had pulled John out of retirement for.  Donalson was actually the one commander who’d followed himself that John had actually approved of upon reading up on the past few years of his new-old command, and the only one who’d managed to last over six months in Atlantis without dying, going crazy, getting kidnapped, or getting mutinied under (that one had tried to negotiate with the Wraith; the Athosians and a few other trading partners in exchange for leaving Earth alone.  Unsurprisingly, there had been no official reprimands or black marks on the permanent records of the mutineers, and John was pretty sure that commander had met some lucky Wraith’s ‘dietary requirements’).

“So, do you do any liaising, then?” John prodded.  

Morris shrugged.  “I’d interpret what the old Prime Minister’s office was saying the few times the Colonel had to talk with them.  Haven’t had much to do with the new P.M., since he entered office after Colonel Donalson transferred back to the SGC.”  A faint expression of distaste flickered across Morris’s face, and, considering how well liked Donalson had been, John wondered what Morris had against the British Prime Minister.  Probably didn’t agree with his politics.  God knew John had been really un-fond of some Presidents in his time.

“Well, you probably don’t have to worry about that anymore, considering I can usually understand what people are saying.”  Just not always what they mean.  “Anyway.”  John dragged the conversation back on track, and slapped his knees with his hands to emphasize how on-track he was being.  “No, Morris, I don’t have a problem with you.  I have a problem with not being on my team anymore, so treat them right and keep them alive and in one piece and you won’t have anything to worry about.”

Morris looked a little unsettled, and John grinned sharply at him.  Good.  Because if the kid let one of his team get hurt, John would…  do something to him.  Something bad.  He’d come up with something before it was needed; maybe he’d even let Rodney give it a stab.  McKay was good at thinking up ways to make people regret their existence without leaving lasting physical damage (though, according to the scientists, psychological trauma was a definite possibility), and he was always best when it was his own possible injury and/or demise he was revenging.  “I won’t, sir.  I mean, they’re my- team.  Friends.  Fam- team, sir,” Morris turned to tell John at the door, as John was ushering him out.  And just like that, John’s good mood deflated like a punctured balloon.  

Morris should be close to his team, they _should_ be like family to him, hell, that’s what had kept John and Teyla and Rodney and Ronon alive for so long, kept them from giving up so many times.  But Morris was taking John’s place in the field, in the team, in that family, and it fucking hurt.  

Goddamn Laura for dying, anyway.  Not that he thought she would have been a stay at home mom, but one of them could have stayed with Jesse while the other was offworld, they could have taken turns…  And then one of them would have gotten injured or kidnapped or drugged or killed, because this was Pegasus and it was freaking inevitable, and Jesse would have had to deal with that.  No.  This was-  Not going offworld, it wasn’t better, but it could be worse.  He could be stuck on Earth again—not that he didn’t love the ranch, but in a contest between Atlantis and the ranch, there was no question of which his heart voted for every time.  At least this way, John was in his city.  And god, did he envy Jesse for getting to grow up in Atlantis, for however long it lasted.

But, shit.  Watching his team grow away from him—and not doing anything to stop them from growing away from him or doing anything to sabotage their newfound closeness with Morris (because that would be the same as sabotaging their safety on future missions)—was going to be hell.  And what was he going to do, replace them?  With who, the Spencer boys?  Yeah, right.  The only way John knew how to form close friendships was under fire, and that wasn’t going to be happening again anytime soon, seeing as he was flying a desk now (well, a city, but it was the same thing).  

Disgusted with himself and the pity-party he was apparently throwing himself, John buried himself in his paperwork until the wee hours of the morning, falling asleep in the middle of filling out a form that approved yet another form requisitioning more storage space allotted to peanut butter, ammunition, condoms and morphine on the next _Daedalus_ run.  Because, as sad as it was, those were the things Atlantis went through the most.  John woke up the next morning with a crick in his neck, and a laptop in two pieces on the living room floor, monitor snapped away from the body like it was manufactured by Lego and not the United States military (or whoever the hell they were contracting computers out to that week), that’d broken after it’d fallen to the floor from his lap during the night.  

His week was just getting better and better.

 


	2. In which our heroes meet the neighbors

JOHN

It’d been two months now since John had returned to Atlantis, and the Wraith were being too quiet.  Quiet enough that Woolsey had capitalized on it and declared a Sunday.  The silence from the Wraith was making John itchy and nervous, because he knew that meant they were planning something big.  It couldn’t be good, the quiet.  But then again, if there was an emergency, he’d be able to get out from behind his piles of paperwork and actually do something to help, so he didn’t know if it was his intuition or his boredom that was behind his uneasiness.  

Sundays were for rest.  They were for sleeping in and reading the paper over a steaming cup of coffee while Jesse watched cartoons, or the Atlantis equivalent thereof, which usually involved the ongoing competition with Rodney to come up with the most humiliating way to destroy the species as a whole, because nothing said ‘suck that, catfish’ quite like importing the Justice League from an alternate reality for the sole purpose of pitting them against the Wraith.  (Rodney still said it was a stupid idea, and preferred Jesse’s idea of creating a quantum singularity and just throwing them all inside it so they got “squished to meatloaf and eated by a ‘gasmetti [spaghetti] monster.”  Honestly, John did too.  His kid was _cool._ )  Sundays were for laziness, and for ignoring the recent disturbing quiet from the Wraith.  

This was like herding cats.  There was nothing rest-like about it.  John was mentally banging his head against the wall for ever suggesting it, because the only person he had to blame was himself.  Woolsey had announced at the senior staff meeting few days ago that today was going to be a mandatory rest day, one of the Sundays that Elizabeth had instituted so many years ago, and as soon as the meeting let out Teyla had announced that she was going to spend the day with Torren on the mainland.  John’s stupid, stupid mouth had piped up and volunteered to bring Jesse over to visit Torren.  Teyla had agreed happily, saying it’d been too long since the boys had had time together.  Shawn, John’s stupid, stupid brother, had overheard and asked if he could meet the Athosians, and John’s stupid, stupid mouth had agreed without consulting his brain, and had gone on to invite Rodney and Ronon and Eliot along while it was at it.

It had taken forever to corral them all onto the jumper, and John had only himself to blame.  Jesse was the best behaved of the bunch, which was just sad, considering the rest of them were well into adulthood.  Having Rodney, Ronon, Eliot and Shawn together in an enclosed space was already spelling hell on John’s nerves, and he wasn’t even trapped inside the jumper with them yet.  John quietly thunked his head against the hull of the jumper a couple of times as Rodney and Shawn started sniping at each again, Eliot and Ronon’s quiet conversation about knives a soft counterpoint to the rising volume of Rodney and Shawn’s rapid fire exchange of insults.

Finally, everyone was on board.  John headed up the ramp, the last to board, and made his way through the cargo hold to the cabin, ignoring the adults and double-checking Jesse’s harness in the co-pilot’s seat.  Inertial dampeners were all well and good until someone shot them out or an EMP field came out of nowhere and the jumper plummeted to the ground like the aerodynamic rock it was.  Plus, he was thinking about maybe letting the kid take the controls for a couple minutes on the way there, and last time had been fairly exciting, considering Jesse flew straighter than McKay (because McKay didn’t explore the artificial gravity controls while piloting the way Jesse did).

John swung into in the pilot’s seat of the jumper, and three things happened simultaneously.  John mentally started up the Jumper, the HUDs flashed up on the front window, and techno started blasting from the cargo-bay speakers with eardrum-shattering volume.  John jumped and slapped his hands over his ears in a futile gesture—the ‘music’ bled through at a hardly depreciated volume and the bass line was thumping so loudly he could feel it vibrating in his chest.  John glared around.  Rodney was trying—poorly—to hide an expression of unholy glee; the culprit behind this was obvious.  And while, yeah, John could get McKay being pleased with himself for finally figuring out how to hack the Jumper’s system—seriously.   _Techno?_   

“McKay,” John growled, and even though he couldn’t hear himself speak, Rodney must have read his lips.  Rodney widened his eyes under arched brows in a poor attempt to look innocent, but gave it up after a few seconds and did something to his touch-screen that lowered the volume.  Now that it was quieter John could understand the words blasting out of the speakers over the heavy bass, and rolled his eyes in disgust.

“It’s your [_theme song_](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj5_vkpxTKQ), Sheppard,” Rodney grinned, unfazed by John’s glare.

It was a goddamned earworm, that’s what it was.   _Unpin the galaxy, the space kung-fu master-boy/the space kung-fu master boy has come here to save the world._  The words were already running through John’s mind with that annoying permanence that meant he’d be muttering the fucking thing under his breath to himself for days.  

He really, really regretted ever even thinking about asking the Spencer boys to come to Atlantis.  They were obviously a bad influence.

 

ELIOT

The Athosians were an okay people.  They reminded him of a couple of places he’d been back on Earth; tough, hardy people ready to pick up and go at any moment, but still generally content and happy in a way that was hard to grasp for someone raised in a possessions-based capitalist society.  Shawn was standing next to Eliot, taking it all in, when he suddenly started snorting with laughter.  Eliot looked over with raised brows, and Shawn pointed with his chin up a nearby tree; there was a teenager, Jinto, Eliot thought he’d been introduced as, nestled in a crook between the branches and the trunk, extremely intent on something in his hands.  Eliot looked closer—was that?  It was.  Jinto was playing a PSP.  

Eliot grinned.  Earth had definitely made an impact on the Athosians.

A kid ran by them, dragging a giggling Jesse along by the hand, and was two feet past them when he suddenly stopped without warning and Jesse stumbled into him and knocked the both of them to the ground.  At the same moment as Jesse knocked his friend over, the PSP fell out of the branches as Jinto swung down out of the tree.  The kid managed to catch it while they were both still in midair, which was just impressive, considering he was yelling something at the top of his lungs at the same time, like he was trying to be some kind of one-man tornado warning siren.  

Teyla burst out of the tent where she’d been talking to a group of the Athosians, looking around wildly until she spotted Jesse and his friend, and then seemed to spot Eliot and Shawn as an afterthought.  “Torren, Jesse!  Spencers!  Follow me!” she commanded, and Eliot obeyed without thinking, bolting the few steps it took to scoop up Jesse and passing him off to Shawn, who’d stayed on Eliot’s six when Eliot ran towards the kids and away from Teyla, grabbing up Jesse’s ganglier and taller friend for himself, and they took off running after Teyla, who was headed into the woods.  The PSP kid was heading off in another direction, though still towards the woods, with another group of people that included John and Ronon, and the sight of them reminded Eliot of his radio.

“Sheppard!  What’s-“

John cut him off.  “Culling.  Stay down, stay quiet, listen to Teyla.  She tells you to jump, you better be in the air before you’re asking how high, understood?”

“Yessir,” Eliot agreed, and cleared the radio.  A culling.  The Wraith.  He’d read the reports and had all the mandatory briefings since coming to Atlantis, even watched the video file of John turning into a shriveled husk of an old man when the thing stuck its hand on his chest.  That was something he wished he’d never seen, even if he couldn’t really make himself believe it was real, but Sheppard had ordered him to watch it.  Eliot understood mentally that he was in a foreign galaxy and living on a flying city built by aliens and that he was in the middle of a galaxy-wide war, but it was one thing to know something in your head and another to know it in your gut.  

A screaming whine split the air and a triangular shape flashed overhead, moving through the air almost too fast to see, a white beam of light scanning the ground under it as it flew, and Eliot’s gut was starting to get the picture.  A second whine split the air above them, and Eliot had a split second to notice a flash of white out of the corner of his eye as the beam missed Teyla by a hair as she lunged out of the way with what looked like a spine-wrenching dive.  The white light hit him and Shawn and their precious cargo before Eliot could do more than reach out towards Shawn as he tried to grab him and fling them all out of the path of the light.

 

JOHN

“Ok, try it now.  So I vote we start calling the rest days Tuesdays, or Wednesdays or Thursdays or something.  Bad things always happen on Sundays.  Bad things never happen on Thursdays.”  McKay passed the improvised RPG launcher back to John.

“The world ends on a Thursday.”  John settled the launcher on his shoulder and aimed it at the dart Jinto pointed out over the settlement.

“According to Neil Gaiman.  Who is obviously the master of the universe, what was I thinking?” McKay tapped at something on his ever-present touch screen, and gave John the nod to fire.

“Space vampires, McKay.”  John pulled the trigger—well, awkwardly and one handedly twisted together the exposed wires designated as the trigger—and managed to keep the launcher aimed just in front of the nose of the dart as it screamed over the settlement as he fired.  The dart blew up in a viscerally satisfying fireball.

“Point.”

John wasn’t paying much attention to anything other than blowing up the darts and trying to keep track of which of them Jinto was pointing out as having culled and which were safe to blow until Teyla’s frantic voice came over his radio and the rest of the world simply stopped existing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Kids get culled, as happens in Pegasus.


	3. In which the Wraith are poor hosts

SHAWN

Shawn opened his eyes only to promptly shut them again and wait to wake up.  This was going to be one of those _weird_ dreams, he could tell already.  The brief glimpse he’d had when he’d opened his eyes had seared into his mind, just like every glimpse always did, and he took the time while he was waiting to wake up to review it.  Dim and orangy-green light illuminating a wall about eight feet in front of him.  The wall was a really dark and disgusting green that was almost black, and looked unpleasantly squishy to the touch, like it had a layer of some completely deadly mold on it.  It looked malevolent, as much as a wall could be malevolent.  His glance gave him an odd impression of height, like the floor was farther away than he was used to, but he dismissed that as unimportant—he was probably just dreaming he was taller again.  The wall extended past his peripheral vision without curving or being intersected by anything, so he was either standing near, and facing, the wall of a large room, or was facing the opposite wall of a long, narrow room or maybe a hallway.  Most likely a big empty basement in a damp climate, what with the mold.  Though maybe not, considering he hadn’t seen a ceiling intersect the wall, and standing eight feet back and looking straight across would mean the ceilings were at least a good 7 feet above his head, which wasn’t something really common in subterranean basements.  Maybe it was a cave, though the walls were a little smooth for that.  

Time passed as he ruminated over this place he’d dreamed himself into and waited to wake up, until the sudden explosion of his sense of smell brought with it the overwhelming need to sneeze.  Up until he started smelling things again, he hadn’t even noticed the lack of the sense, in that way that dreams had—you’d only feel or hear or see or smell something when it had a particular part in the plotless plot that ruled the dream.  Predominantly dank and sour, the overwhelming scent also had undertones of metallic copper and the sickly sweet scent of overripe fruit, something Shawn’s subconscious immediately tagged as a bad bad bad smell. The reek of the place was so strong he could taste it, like a blanket of some viscous liquid coating his tongue and slipping inexorably down the back of it to coat his throat and eventually seep its way down his throat and clog his lungs, and an image of the deadly mold on the wall across the way creeping its way into his mouth and down his throat replaced the overwhelming need to sneeze the smell out of his nasal passages with the urge to vomit it out of his esophagus. _I really,_ really _don’t like this dream,_ Shawn thought to himself, half coherently, before his limbs began to tingle, then blaze, with fiery pins and needles, and Shawn came to the unfortunate realization that this wasn’t, in fact, a dream.

He groaned at the tingling as sensation returned to his limbs, and an answering groan to his left had him snapping his eyes open again.  Shawn couldn’t turn his head, he was immobilized (he squashed the brief hysterical paralyzed that echoed in his head) by something, but he could make out a dim silhouette when he rolled his eyes all the way to the left, a silhouette that reminded him vaguely of Egyptian mummies.  Shawn took a moment to be glad that Gus wasn’t here to scream and carry on—which, why wasn’t he here, come to think of it?  

With that incentive, Shawn started scouring his memory of the dream, and the rest of his neurons finally started firing as the effects of the stunner that’d been waiting on the other end of the culling beam wore off, and Shawn remembered where he was and what had- he rolled his eyes to the right, and there were two smaller lumps on the wall to the other side of him.  Thank god.  Eliot was waking up and they hadn’t been separated from the kids.  Now all they had to do was get out the bondage-esque cocoons and find a way off the freaking ship without the life-sucking aliens in drag catching them.  Easy as cake.  A really reallycomplicated cake, like the ones they made on those Food Network competition shows, maybe.

Yeah, it could work.

Eliot groaned again, and started swearing under his breath; Shawn took that to mean he’d regained consciousness.  The fiery pins and needles in Shawn’s arms and legs finally started to ease off, with the unsettling phantom sensation that the tingles were drip-dripping out his fingers and toes to splatter against the restraining cocoon.  He started twisting and wriggling in an attempt to get the cocoon to loosen its hold.  Unsurprisingly, Shawn’s contortions had little effect on the disturbingly warm and alive-feeling material wrapped closely around him.  It wasn’t like the space vampires hadn’t had 10,000 years to figure out how to tie their knots right, or something to that effect.  And they’d probably learned pretty quickly that their food would run away screaming after tearing out of their bindings with panic-induced strength, and that a good pantry was a locked pantry.  Shawn shook his head, knowing enough to know he wasn’t thinking clearly yet even though he couldn’t get so far as to actually start thinking clearly.  But hey, look, an explosion—maybe he wasn’t gonna have to try and bake that cake after all.  Shawn grimaced, and spared a neuron to regret that metaphor; he was taking it a little too far even for him, and he didn’t have the luxury of ignoring himself—it was really damned hard to escape yourself when you were trapped in your own head.

Light flashed down the corridor, strafing the walls with intermittent bursts of warm yellow light, and the sharp repeating report of P-90 fire was like music to his ears.  (Poorly recorded crappy garage band music, but still music.)  He didn’t know how long he’d been out of it, and couldn’t remember anyone ever telling him how long a stunner blast lasted (because of course he’d never need to know that, it’s not like Atlantis was fighting a guerilla war against overwhelming odds or anything, and of course the Wraith wouldn’t ever go for someone the SGC deemed a non-combatant, because the Wraith were just _ethical_ like that), but he could certainly appreciate the rescue team’s promptness.  Rescue team.  How the hell did their rescuers know where to find them, anyway?

“The signal’s getting stronger—he’s down here, this way!” a vaguely familiar voice shouted over the P-90 fire and the intermittent whine that must be coming from the Wraiths’ weapons.  Bulky shapes, frequently backlit by the strobing flashes from P-90s and the occasional grenade, moved slowly down the hall, growing larger as they grew nearer to Shawn and his companions.  The fact they were so small to begin with brought home how really ridiculously long the corridor was.  But the people were reassuringly varying heights, unlike the Wraith (apparently there was a height requirement—and restriction—for being a life-sucking space vampire, which was, well, actually not much weirder than anything else in this galaxy), and Shawn was confident enough that they were on the Kill The Wraith team and not the Suck Shawn Dry And Brittle team that he started hollering to let them know where exactly they were.

“We’re here!  Both Spencers and the kids!  Trying for a remake of _Cocoon_!” he shouted down the hall, not caring much what he was saying as long as he was saying it loudly enough for them to pinpoint their position in case the mysterious signal wasn’t very definitive.  Either they had heard his hoarse yell over the explosions and gunfire, or the signal was way more precise than the crappy handheld GPS he’d gotten in a garage sale a couple of years ago to play at geo-caching with Gus, because in less than a minute their rescuers were cutting them out of their organic saran-wrap with wicked looking knives and catching them before they faceplanted on the disgusting floor that looked like it was carpeted with the same mold that lived on the walls.  Shawn and Eliot each got a Marine under each arm, and the two still unconscious kids got grabbed up by the man-mountain Shawn belatedly recognized as Ronon as easily, though more gently, as if they were down-filled pillows.

“Lorne, Ronon, get them back to Jumper Three.  Shut it up tight and get the fuck out of here.  We’ll be right behind you with the rest of the culled in the other Jumpers.”  John’s voice was so tight with stress Shawn almost didn’t recognize it.  One of Eliot’s helpers tossed off a sloppy salute in John’s general direction.  The Marines under his arms started a jog-trot back the way they’d come, helping (dragging) Shawn along with them, Eliot’s helpers doing the same, Ronon striding beside them effortlessly, and the rest of the rescue squad split into two groups.  One of the groups surrounded their ungainly parade to protect them on the way back to the Jumper, and the other group started checking the cocoons and alcoves around the ones that had played host to Shawn and Company, presumably checking for signs of living prisoners.  Shawn’s half-brother and his pet scientist and the Warrior Princess were in the second group, and Shawn caught the anguished glance both John and Warrior Princess speared Ronon with before the first group turned a corner and lost sight of the second group.  

Oh.  Right.  

One of those unconscious kids was Shawn’s nephew, and the other must be Warrior Princess’s son.  Shawn winced as his opinion of his half-brother took a dramatic leap upwards.  It took some serious ‘right stuff’ to stay and rescue other people after just getting your son back from certain death, trusting others to protect him and keep him safe while you try and get others to safety.  Shit, Big Brother (and Warrior Princess) set a high standard to live up to, and Shawn wasn’t sure he could ever be as good a man as John (or Warrior Princess) was.  

Trying could be fun, though.  Or, you know, result in gruesome death.  Same difference.


	4. In which the rescue goes exactly as planned, because what could possibly go wrong?

JOHN

John spared one look at Jesse being carried down the hall by Ronon before turning back to his task of searching for the rest of the people the Wraith had culled from Athos mark 3.  It was the hardest thing he’d done in a long time, not sticking right by his side until Carson reassured him Jesse was fine, but he did it because he had to.  Jesse going back now meant that if he needed medical assistance, he’d get it as soon as possible.  John needed to stay because he’d had the most experience of anyone on the expedition when it came to infiltrating Wraith ships, and with him there to add his knowledge to the pool his men would be more likely to survive the mission.  He nodded at Teyla when he caught her looking after Torren with much the same expression he’d felt on his face a moment ago.  Of course she’d make the same decision he had—her people needed her there when the Marines opened the cocoons to reassure them that it really was real and not some Wraith-sent hallucination.  After some time and some really surprising and devious PR spin on Rodney’s part, the Athosians had come to view the fact that Teyla had Wraith DNA as an asset to be lauded and not a flaw to be loathed, and as a whole her people now had more faith and trust in her than they had had before the information had gotten out.

It was a good thing Woolsey hadn’t made any noise about the wisdom of Atlantis’s military commander leading the rescue mission, because John thought he just might have tried to kill him if he’d tried to stop John from going after his boy.  Not only had John led the mission, he’d returned to Atlantis long enough to strip her of her entire command structure, excluding Woolsey and Carson (Atlantis’s new/old Chief Medical Officer, now back in Atlantis for his encore performance after Keller’s transfer).  He’d tapped both his 2IC and 3IC, Lorne and Morris, and their teams, one of whose members was Atlantis’s Chief Science Officer—McKay—so he belatedly hoped to god the Wraith wouldn’t pick now to find and attack Atlantis.  If they did, the city would burn—he’d left no one to protect her, aside from McKay’s 2IC.  But Radek Zelenka was scrappy, and he’d served his years in the Czech army back when it was still compulsory, so he had that to fall back on if things got hairy.  Zelenka would take care of his city, he had to trust that and focus on the mission.

Turning away from the corridor Jesse and Torren had been taken down was almost physically painful, but John managed it.  He brought up his Life Signs Detector into his line of sight and saw only the life signs of his team in his immediate vicinity.  John rounded up his people and led the way deeper into the Wraith cruiser in search of the rest of the people they’d come to rescue.

 

ELIOT

Eliot regained full consciousness in the middle of a forced march down a dark and reeking hallway.  His first reaction, striking out at the ones who were pretty much carrying him, was checked by the fact his limbs weren’t responding like they should.  His punch at the soldier to his right and kick to the soldier on his left resulted in a weak flail of the arm draped across the right-hand soldier’s shoulders and a twitch in his feet as they dragged along the ground slightly behind him.  “The Corporal’s waking up, Colonel,” the right-hand soldier called ahead in a low voice, and Eliot relaxed minutely.  Rescue mission, must be.  

“The others?” Eliot quietly asked the Marines hauling him down the corridor.  He almost recognized them now—he’d sparred with the one on his left yesterday.  Well, the day before they’d visited the Athosians, anyway.  He didn’t know how long he’d been out, yet.  It could have been hours or days or even weeks, the cocoons could have had some sort of drug in them or something to keep their occupants out for the count, which only made sense when you were transporting living livestock looking to escape.

“You, the psychic, and the Colonel’s and Teyla’s sons were the first we found.  We’re taking you back to the Jumper and straight back to Atlantis while Colonel Sheppard and the rest keep looking for survivors,” the Marine on his left informed him quietly.  Eliot could almost remember the soldier’s name, it was on the tip of his tongue; started with a W.  Williams, Wilkes, Werner… Something like that.

Eliot opened his mouth to ask if the rest of them were okay, but Captain W-something hushed him with a quick hand sign, and his two supports—along with the rest of the group—melted silently against the walls of the corridor as the muffled sound of multiple feet marching in step echoed quietly down the corridor before fading away again.  A patrol must have passed an entrance to this corridor somewhere down the line.

A few more turns and one more terrifying near-brush with a patrol and they entered an echoingly large bay whose walls were honeycombed with tiny holes.  Looking closer, Eliot was able to make out the indistinct shapes of darts inside a few of the holes, and had to suppress the fission of fear that chilled his spine at the realization of exactly how large the bay was and how many darts it held—and how many Wraith that meant were on the ship.  And fuck, this was only a cruiser, and not one of the giant Hive ships.

Lorne murmured something indistinct into his radio, and waved them forward.  Eliot’s handlers stepped forward into an empty and non-descript patch of floor and the Jumper materialized around Eliot.  Captain W and Major Smith set him down on one of the benches along the back walls of the Jumper’s rear bay and strapped him in, other Marines doing the same for Shawn, and Dex took the kids up to the front and strapped them into the more secure webbing on the jump-seats in the cockpit.  Captain Wentrcek—it was light enough in the Jumper to read the tags glinting over his tac vest—stripped off his tac vest and took the pilot’s seat while the rest of them filed back out of the Jumper with Dex at the rear.  “Going back to help Sheppard,” he grunted when he noticed Eliot watching.  “Keep them safe,” he added before taking the final step off the Jumper’s ramp.  The _or I’ll kill you_ , seemed to be implied, but that was something Eliot understood.  Jesse wormed his way into your heart until you’d do anything to keep the kid happy.  He didn’t actually know if Dex had been talking to him or Wentrcek, but he was going to do his best regardless.

“Atlantis, here we come,” Eliot heard Wentrcek say softly in the cockpit, and the corner of the viewscreen that Eliot could see from his position lit up with HUDs and diagrams as Wentrcek powered up the Jumper and got it in the air.  When Eliot felt the inertial dampeners kick on—his stomach lurched every time they initialized, something to do with Eliot’s over-sensitive proprioception, Doctor Beckett had told him—Eliot suddenly realized they were actually going to make it out of this hell hole.

 

JOHN

Seventeen Athosians and two desiccated corpses later, all of the people the Wraith had culled from Athos had been accounted for.  Horrible as it was, John was relieved that only two of the people culled from the settlement had been fed on.  The horrible part was, he was glad that the Wraith had fed on them rather than on Jesse.  What made it worse was he’d recognized the wristband Jinto’s friend Sathem had taken to wearing in imitation of John when he’d first met the kid, back when the kid had still been a kid.  He’d also recognized the necklace Elizabeth had gifted Wehn with, so many years ago.  He’d known these villagers, known them for years, since before he’d even known Jesse’s mom, and while he grieved the fact that they were dead, he couldn’t help but be thankful.  Whether it had been intentional or not, the fact that they’d died meant his son hadn’t, and he’d never forget that.  Or them.  

They didn’t have the luxury of taking the bodies back with them, not when they had seventeen living civilians in the middle of a Wraith cruiser to get to the docking bay, protected by only two teams, minus Lorne’s fourth and plus John.  John carefully removed Sathem’s wristband and Wehn's necklace while it was quiet and the LSD was dark, stowing them in one of his TAC vest’s many pockets as something to give to their families.  Almost as soon as he’d velcroed the pocket closed, the LSD lit up with the red markers it tagged the Wraith with.  A team of four was heading their way down the corridor—and it was coming from the direction of the docking bay.  Which was where the Jumpers were waiting for them.

“Shit!” John muttered under his breath, echoed a moment later by Lorne.  Lorne had disobeyed John’s semi-implied order to take Jesse and the rest back to Atlantis, stating simply that he must have misunderstood and wouldn’t it be something better discussed while not in the bowels of a Wraith ship with patrols wandering the halls, sir?  Honestly, right now John couldn’t really blame him.  He’d be up shit creek without a paddle with only three others and seventeen civilians, and he knew it.  If he’d been thinking straight, he’d have ordered Lorne to do exactly what he’d done, and sent only a single Marine with the ATA gene to fly them back to Atlantis.  Hell, if he’d been in Lorne’s position, he’d have done exactly what his 2IC had—and had, in fact, done just that in the past.  It got him… nevermind what it had gotten John.  Lorne was gonna get a verbal reprimand for disobeying orders and a pat on the back for keeping his head on straight.  He didn’t need anything in his file to fuck up _his_ career.

Speaking of keeping his head on straight, “Sir, they’re coming straight for us and the LSD doesn’t show any branching corridors ahead that we can duck down.  We can take the risk they’re not going to the pens and hide down thataway, but it’s further to get back there than it is to the Jumper,” Lorne’s muttered in his ear via the radio in a harsh whisper.  

“Goddamn _madar gai, chocheh sag haramzadeh!_ ” John spit out under his breath, forgetting that he wasn’t the only one who’d spent time in Afghanistan until Morris made a strangled choking sound that suspiciously resembled muffled laughter.  “Fuck!”  John shot Morris a dirty look and continued at the same volume he’d sworn at, since apparently that had translated well enough.  “Stop laughing, Major.  Lorne, we’re heading for the Jumpers, look alive and try to stay that way—you’re on point.  I’ve got your six.  Ronon, Morris, Smith, Teyla; your jobs are to keep the civilians alive.  Rodney, Parrish; you keep them heading for the Jumpers, no matter what.”  

Lorne acknowledged him with a brief, faint smile and a quiet, “Sir,” and ghosted off ahead, towards the four Wraith approaching them.  The four he’d set to guarding the Athosians edged near the front of the group and started forward slightly slower than Lorne had been moving, Morris taking the time to let John know over radio in a quiet voice that was still shaking fairly suspiciously, “Sir, your accent sucks.  Rather a lot.”

“I could say the same to you, Wiltshire,” John growled back absentmindedly, under his breath, provoking another quiet ‘coughing’ fit from Morris’s direction.  It looked like McKay and Parrish—and really, why Lorne felt he had to bring a _botanist_ , of all things, on a rescue mission to a _Wraith cruiser_ , John had no clue—were having success with the Athosians.  Parrish seemed to be getting through to them without any problem, communicating urgency but not hysteria, and the civilians were moving after the guards at a nice quickstep with little to no panic visible.  McKay didn’t seem to be doing much chivvying of his own, but then again, knowing McKay, that was probably a good thing.  Instead, he seemed to be watching everywhere at once while he stayed near the back of the group of civilians, one hand holding his datapad up where he could see it but where it wouldn’t obscure his view, and the other resting on his P-90 in such a way he’d be able to bring it up and fire in less than a second.  It was almost like he’d assigned himself the rearguard position.  John took a moment to glance at Parrish before turning back to keep an eye behind them, and Parrish was displaying the same behavior, except without the datapad and with his P-90 raised and aimed off to the side, away from the Athosians, so casually it looked like habit.  The two scientists almost looked like soldiers, strangely enough.

It took John longer than it should have to realize that there was a perfectly valid reason they looked like soldiers, and the only excuse he could think of was the fact that he was on his first mission in the bowels of a Wraith star-cruiser in a while, compounded by the fact his son had been culled in order to be some alien’s main entrée and had been only recently rescued.  Which, granted, was a pretty good excuse, as excuses go.  But the reason his scientists looked like soldiers was because they were soldiers.  McKay had been on the front lines of an interstellar war for going on ten years now, and Parrish was less than a year behind McKay in experience.  John felt his heart practically burst with a strange sense of pride for his scientists’ military prowess, not something he’d ever thought he’d feel.

And that, of course, was when the Wraith found them.


	5. In which when one hand giveth, the other taketh away

JOHN

McKay hollered and let off a burst of fire, sending tightly grouped clusters into the wall opposite him.  About to mock McKay for his jumpiness, John froze.  The wall was slowly changing, somehow, something he’d never seen before.  It was almost like the ship wasn’t only organic, and technically alive, but… well, John _really_ didn’t want to say sentient.  (Not only would he have to start equating the Wraith ships with Atlantis in his mind, but he had a really vivid image of the possibility of Hal being tucked in some out-of-the-way corner here, singing _Daisy, Daisy_ to himself.  Which didn’t help with the creep-factor the Wraith already had going for them.)  Regardless, the wall was changing shape while they watched, and a quick glance at his Life Signs Detector let John know there was a patrol on the opposite side of the wall, not moving.  Like they were waiting for the wall to open, and like they knew what was waiting for them on the other side.  

“Shit!”  John didn’t bother trying to keep quiet that time.  “Lorne, down the hall, go, go!  Get everyone to the Jumpers and out as fast as you can, I’ve got the rear.”  Lorne hesitated for a moment, mouth open like he was going to say something.  “Colonel, that’s an order!  Now, _move_!” John roared.  Lorne took off, the civilians shadowing the soldiers down the hall.  

John turned back to the wall, to see McKay fiddling with something inside the wall, the living surface slit open and his arm stuffed inside the slit up to his elbow.  It was always a fairly disturbing sight, and even more so now that John was starting to anthropomorphize the wall.  “What the hell, McKay?” John snapped.  “Believe it or not, you’re included in the ‘everyone’ in ‘everyone get to the Jumpers’.”

McKay waved his free hand at John for a moment in a ‘talk, talk, talk,’ gesture without looking away from what he was doing to the wall, “Yes, sir, Colonel, sir, whatever you say, sir.  Hand me that retractor, will you?”  

Briefly mollified against his will, John handed the surgical instrument to McKay.  “Been raiding Beckett’s supplies again?  What the hell are you doing?  You shouldn’t have stayed behind with me in the first place.”

“Yes, well, what Carson doesn’t know won’t hurt me.  And like I’m going to risk going back to Atlantis without you—the lab rat would never forgive me.”  John mouthed ‘ _lab rat_ ’ to himself in confusion, and either McKay had turned long enough to notice, or John was going to really have to start seriously worrying about telepathy because McKay paused for a moment to explain, in his _I can’t believe you’re still such a moron after all these years voice_ , “My lab rat.”  When John still didn’t understand, McKay continued in his most exasperated tone, before getting back on track with his explanation, “Your _spawn_ , Colonel.  Anyway, I had an idea about the seemingly autonomous actions we’ve seen the interiors of the Wraith ships display and the possibilities of the Wraith utilizing artificial intelligence systems, maybe even some sort of artificial biological intelligence, and if I can just set up this interface and…” McKay trailed off as the wall started becoming translucent as it thinned even more, the process seeming to speed up as less and less material remained in the area that was starting to look an awful lot like the other doorways in the corridor.  The four Wraith drones on the other side of the soon-to-be-nonexistent wall didn’t look too happy with them—not that you could really tell if drones ever looked happy, with the bone masks and the being Wraith and all, but John felt it was a pretty educated guess to assume that these four weren’t overjoyed to find the livestock roaming free.  

“You’re done, McKay, unless you _want_ to be dinner,” John growled, yanking McKay out of the wall by his collar and shoving McKay in front of him as they scrambled down the hall, away from the translucent wall and the drones hovering behind it.  

They raced down the hall, McKay’s face glowing red with exertion (and probably the complaints and insults he was sensibly not wasting his breath on) as he kept up with John.  John was impressed, because he wasn’t holding back, though he’d start if McKay started lagging behind.  They were about halfway between Lorne’s group and the four drones behind the mutating doorway when a wild stunner blast from behind him let John know with a fair degree of certainty that the door was a real door now, or close enough not to matter.  The blast missed them both, but had nearly clipped McKay.  John reached out and grabbed the shoulder of McKay’s TAC vest, put on a burst of speed, and yanked them both into a cross corridor that read as empty on his LSD.  “We can’t let them catch up with Lorne, he’ll have no chance if he’s fighting on both sides,” John commented as McKay gulped air and wheezed harshly, his throat sounding pretty torn up.  John made a mental note to teach McKay how to breathe correctly when running before the next time they had to run for their lives.

“Sure,” McKay got out in between gasps for air, “We’ll just ask.  Nicely and they’ll.  Give us their stunners.”  Of course, not even lack of oxygen could dull McKay’s cutting remarks.  John wondered why that still surprised him, when he could clearly remember the exact same thing surprising him time after time on missions in the past.

“Or, we could just shoot them and steal their stunners after they’re dead,” he retorted drolly, fully expecting the exasperated eyeroll McKay bestowed on him for the remark.  John kept glancing at the LSD clutched in his hand, and finally their four red Wraith signs showed up, moving briskly towards his and McKay’s pale dots, between the thin red lines the LSD used to delineate the cruiser’s corridor.  (And the LSD only used red lines in Wraith ships, which made John wonder if there was something to McKay’s ABI theory.)  John gestured for Rodney to be quiet—not that he was being particularly noisy at the moment—and signaled to him that the patrol was approaching.  With another gesture, he indicated Rodney should try to take out the front two, and that John was going to aim for the back two.  It was a good thing the Wraith and the Goa’uld had never gotten to compare notes, because the standard box formation they both tended to patrol in made life significantly—or at least slightly—easier for the SG teams that came up against them.

The patrol came even with their corridor and John sprayed his two designated Wraith with bullets, hoping to god they hadn’t fed recently and would stay the fuck down.  His two were down before they had a chance to fire, and for a picosecond John had the faint hope that that meant his really awesomely crappy day was taking a turn for the better.  But Pegasus excelled at the taking part of the giving and taking equation, and one of McKay’s drones wasn’t going down.  Bastard must have eaten someone right before patrol.  The second of McKay’s targets was down, but the one was upright and staggering towards them, stunner raised, even as McKay sprayed it with his P-90 on full automatic.  John joined in on the fun, switching his over to full auto too, and _still_ the thing kept moving slowly closer.  Finally, _finally_ , the damn thing fell down and stayed down.  But again, just as John got his hopes up, Pegasus bitch-slapped them back down as the drone managed to smack its hand into the center of its armored chest.  (Which was a really stupidly place for a self destruct button, in John’s opinion, because what if they tripped and face planted?  Not that he was going to complain, since he didn’t give a shit whether he was the one who killed them or they killed themselves off, in the end.)  The button in the center of the drone’s chest plate started flashing frantically, and John once again grabbed McKay by the TAC vest and started off down the corridor towards Lorne and his group, hoping to hell that they were quick enough to get out of the blast radius since there was nothing for them to hide behind.  John pushed himself harder, pushed himself to run faster, pulling McKay with him, and then Rodney tripped.  Rodney’s vest tore out of John’s hand, and John’s momentum carried him a good couple yards further down the corridor as he stumbled to a stop, already turning back around to get Rodney and yank him back up and keep dragging the both of them down the hall faster than he’d thought was humanly possible.  

John was still turning to face Rodney, who was clutching an arm that looked longer than it should, but who was still grimly struggling to get up, when the concussive force of the blast hit them.  John could see the explosion behind Rodney, briefly haloing him with an ironic angelic aura, before the blast’s funneled force knocked them both back down, shrapnel and Wraith parts winging past them at dangerous speeds even as they were knocked to the ground.

Forcing himself back to his feet almost as soon as he’d landed on the ground, John ignored the fluttering spasms of his diaphragm as his lungs tried to get the air that had been knocked out of them back, and the sharp, deep burning pain in his thigh that just meant he really didn’t want to look at it right now.  John managed to get back to where Rodney still lay on the corridor floor, somehow, and to somehow drag Rodney to his feet, apparently by sheer force of will, because John didn’t feel like he could pick up a kitten at this point, and started hauling them both back along the path Lorne’s group had taken, towards where the Jumpers were waiting.

John’s leg had gone numb, the one he still hadn’t looked at, and it felt like he’d been hauling Rodney’s unconscious ( _not dead, God, don’t be dead, I’ll kill you myself if you’re dead, you arrogant sonovabitch_ ) ass for eons, and John’s head was starting to spin up off his neck a little alarmingly.  But he kept moving, kept hauling the both of them towards the Jumpers, because anything else meant death.  After another eon, Morris popped up in front of John from out of thin air and scared the everloving crap out of him.  But at least that meant he’d made it to the Jumpers.  Ignoring Morris’s assistance, even though he didn’t shake it off, he let the Major lead him onto the invisible ship.  As soon as he saw everyone he’d sent ahead crammed into the one Jumper, John knew something was wrong.

“What happened to the other Jumper?” he asked Morris harshly, his voice roughened by the little searing air he’d managed to inhale during the explosion.

“Nothing, sir.  I’ll be covering this one’s escape with it, then follow as soon as I’ve led them astray,” Morris explained quickly, shooting looks out the open hatch of the Jumper as he spoke.

“Good thinking,” he forced out, then coughed harshly.  John wondered if Morris or Lorne had come up with that plan, because it deserved a compliment.  However, “Take-”  Take Ronon with you, he was going to say, but John’s body had apparently decided enough was enough, because it chose that moment to call it quits and John passed out.  

 


	6. In which brotherly bonding occurs (kinda sorta)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: John remembers torturing someone

JOHN

John jolted awake, the sense memory of fragile bones snapping under his hands still tingling in his fingertips.  One rasping gasp for air, two, and then he settled back into his skin, the adrenalin buzz that had jolted him into consciousness fading rapidly.  A monitor beeped somewhere, but he’d already known he was in the infirmary.  He only got those dreams, the memories of the things he’d done and the decisions he’d made that marked him as worse than the Wraith when he was on morphine.  A couple more deep breaths helped him center himself and push back the memories.  (The times he’d been under orders and the times he’d made the decision himself no longer differentiated themselves in his mind.  He’d passed that point a long time ago, and the monster under his skin was there to stay.  The only thing he could do now was try and make sure Jesse never had to go to that place, make those decisions, and hope the dreams that would always plague John would help to keep him human.  Turning into a monster didn’t always mean something offworld had fucked with his DNA.)  

John looked around the infirmary, scouring his mind for his most recent memory in an attempt to orient himself.  His mind was fuzzy and recalcitrant, and instead showed him the face of the sentry John had mined for information at the Ad Hoc building so many months ago.  John shied violently away from the stark image of the guard’s young face, pale with fear and pain and death.  His reaction to the face still hovering in the blank space behind his forehead was strong enough to translate into physical motion, and he nearly knocked himself off the hospital bed.

His abrupt motion jerked on one of the tangle of wires sprouting from his skin, and a machine somewhere off to his left started to whine.  The brief sharp ache of an IV needle shifting in place was more than enough to keep him still and wait for someone to come untangle him, but that didn’t stop the rest of his body from making its own complaints.  John’s right thigh burned with a fierce, throbbing and bone-deep ache, even through the morphine still drifting in his veins, but he avoided looking at it.  Instead, John let his eyes fall shut and cataloged the rest of his aches and pains in an attempt to figure out what had happened.  His left hand felt vaguely wrong, but muted, so it probably just wasn’t bad enough to overpower the drugs.  The same with his right forearm and the whole left side of his back and torso, and the skin on most of his right side felt stretched and too tight.  His right side must have been facing the blast, and it must have knocked him-  

The blast.  

Rodney had been there, had fallen.  John had been turning back to get Rodney back up on his feet so they could keep running.  John’s eyes snapped back open and he scanned the hazy shapes of the infirmary, looking for that familiar, solid outline, either hovering by John’s bed or in a bed of his own, but John didn’t see him.  The monitor that had been beeping insistently since he’d woken up suddenly ratcheted up its tempo, and the whine of the machine he’d aggravated earlier grew louder.  A white, hazy blur blocked the light as it did something to one of the tubes leading into John’s arms and the ache of the shifted IV needle in John’s arm went away, and then the blurry person turned away to do something to the machines.  The irritating whine and beeps from the machines went quiet, and darkness rose up and crashed over John, pulling him back to sleep.

John blinked himself back awake.  Fighting against the lure of sleep and the morphine’s siren song was hard, impossibly hard, but he didn’t want to dream again. The white blur who’d rescued him from his tangled leads was gone again, but John was sure Carson would be back soon enough.  Until then, he worked on getting his vision to behave.  After blinking quickly and often enough that John felt he was about to bring on a seizure, shapes started defining themselves as more than blurry blobs, and colors started to become recognizable.  He hadn’t even noticed he wasn’t noticing colors until he was again, which was a new one; Carson probably had him on one of his special drug cocktails.  The first color John noticed was pink.

The scrubs someone had wrestled his unconscious body into were pink, and clashed violently with the drab and faded blue-green of the hospital sheets.  John rolled his eyes.  Always, with the pink.  He didn’t know whether to blame Carson or the nurses, but whenever he landed in the infirmary, they put him in the pale pink scrubs, and insisted that they were the only ones in his size.  John was a medium, for godsakes.  He knew for a fact that there were other colors to choose from, because his Marines never landed the pink scrubs.  Maybe it was some negative association bullshit Carson had come up with—embarrass him enough and he’ll stop getting hurt—but it didn’t seem to be working out too well so far.

Enough stalling.  John forced himself to look down his body, towards the burning ache in his right leg that was blazing through the morphine like it was children’s Tylenol.  He’d been avoiding looking at since it’d started to hurt after the blast back on the Wraith cruiser, and now he forced himself to just look and get it over with—though he took the scenic route and catalogued all his other injuries first.  

His left hand was in an air cast, and he couldn’t see much of his hand under it, but from the looks of the cast he guessed he’d broken one or two of the long bones, and maybe his wrist as well, considering how far up his arm it extended.  His right forearm was bare to the air and had a line of stitches crawling up the length of it for quite a ways—about eight inches, at a guess.  The skin on his forearm, even under and around the stitches, was sunburn red and looked strangely naked.  It took him a moment to realize that was because all the hair was gone.  The heat of the blast must have singed the hair right off, even as it gave him an instant sunburn.  He couldn’t have stopped his right hand from automatically reaching for his head even if he’d wanted to.  The stitches in his arm pulled and made the move distantly painful, but the reassuring feel of his hair under his hand was worth it.  It was maybe a little shorter on the right than it had been, but it was still there.  His eyebrows didn’t feel any different from normal, upon inspection, which was a relief.  (John didn’t think of himself as a vain man, per se, but if he never had to look at his face without eyebrows again it’d be too soon.  Once had been enough.  He was never getting drunk with Zelenka and Ronon again, ever.)  

John dropped his arm back to the bed and pointed his gaze at the throbbing burn that was his right leg, his eyes skittering away even as he forced them back on target.  His right leg rose up out of the sea-green sheets like it was auditioning for the part of the Loch Ness monster, and was fully enclosed in a cast all the way from his hip to his foot.  It was anchored to one of those traction things Carson had lobbied so hard for on the last grocery run, which was just great.  Well, at least it was still there.  His worst fear had been that it was phantom pain because they’d had to amputate.  But this, well, it wasn’t exactly reason to jump for joy, either.

 

SHAWN

He wasn’t so much hovering tragically in the waiting room as getting poked and prodded in the neighboring bed when Big Brother managed to set off some sort of alarm with what sounded like, from the crash and rattle of the gurney and other medical paraphernalia, some truly inspired flailing.  ‘Please, call me Carson’ let go of the tongue depressor he’d been inflicting on Shawn and darted away (Shawn took the opportunity to gag on it and spit it out, and it landed on the floor with a dampish splat), before returning just as quickly.  “There, now,” he brogued at Shawn, “we don’t have an unlimited supply of those.  Don’t spit this one out, now, or I’ll just use it again,” and stuck another one halfway down Shawn’s throat.  How anyone with such a sexy accent could be so evil, Shawn didn’t know.

“Haw ah haah?” Shawn asked around the tongue depressor of _doom_.

“Oh, the Colonel’s working on waking up, I think.  Don’t you worry about him, he’ll be fine, I’m sure,” Carson answered him with the innate ability of dentists everywhere (and, apparently, geneticists in the Pegasus galaxy) when it came to translating garbled vowels into actual words.  

Carson’s reassurance was actually oddly un-reassuring, but it still eased the something in Shawn’s chest that been charlie-horsing ever since he’d seen John get wheeled straight from the Puddle Jumper to the operating room over five hours ago.  There’d been a lot of blood.  It was vaguely surprising to Shawn, how worried he’d been about the virtual stranger who just happened to be related to him, but there really had been a _lot_ of blood.  He wasn’t resentful at all that he’d had to wait almost six hours (honestly, it was a shorter wait than a lot of his times in various emergency rooms, for worse injuries, had been) for his ‘post-mission exam’, especially not after he’d seen all the blood.  (‘Mission’ was apparently a pretty encompassing word, here.  Get abducted by the Wraith?  Mission.  Get lost in the city?  Mission.  Fall off the pier and nearly drown trying to find a way back up (because apparently the Ancients never tripped and didn’t see a reason for putting stairs up from the water to the ridiculously high piers)?  Mission.  And that was just from personal experience.  They’d probably call it a mission if he stubbed his toe playing tag with his half-nephew, too.)  

Rodney had been taken to the operating room before John had, and was still in there, to the best of Shawn’s knowledge.  He was actually closer to being friends with Rodney than he was with his own half-brother, and was worrying about him too, but Carson hadn’t said anything about Rodney other than ‘we’ll have to wait and see’ the last five times Shawn had asked, so he figured Carson didn’t know yet either.  Carson had been operating on John, and had told Shawn when they’d finished that he was leaving Rodney to steadier hands.  Carson had immediately started the post-mission exams on Eliot and Shawn’s half-nephew and Shawn’s half-nephew’s friend after John had been settled on a hospital bed, telling the other doctor just about to get to them that he needed to keep busy.  (The cranky Asian lady-doctor had already cleared the Athosians and they’d all already gone back home through the gate a while ago.  Shawn didn’t know if it was to pack or what, but staying after the Wraith figured out where they were just seemed silly.)  Shawn hadn’t minded waiting till last, especially since he knew now that El was okay and just sleeping it off in the bed opposite John’s and not in some sort of evil Wraith-induced coma.  The kids had been taken off to the mess hall for snacks by Warrior Princess and Dreadlocks after their checkups, probably because Jesse had been shooting increasingly worried and fearful glances towards his unconscious dad where John was nested in all the tubes and wires and things.

Finally, Carson got tired of inflicting the dread tongue depressor of doom on Shawn.  Carson rolled his eyes at Shawn’s pleading puppy-dog expression, but still pulled a sucker from his stash behind the tongue depressors that he’d raided for the two kids earlier and handed it over.  “You’re as bad as each other, I swear,” Carson muttered under his breath at Shawn.  “Nothing wrong with you, so get your arse out of my infirmary and don’t let me see you back here with anything other than a cold.”  Carson commanded, before wandering off towards the door that most likely led to his office, after a brief detour to stare broodingly at John.  

Shawn heartily approved of Carson’s no-nonsense method of kicking him out.  He could tell that he wouldn’t have to plead for AMA forms around here like he’d had to in Earth hospitals.  (Shawn was never going to get tired of prefacing words with Earth.   _So.  Cool._ )  The infirmary didn’t even have the hated hospital smell, which made hanging around after he’d been kicked out almost bearable.  Even though staying in the infirmary was making him feel a little itchy in the place he’d always imagined his soul lived (if souls even existed, which was something he was still debating with himself), Shawn double-checked on Eliot before he carefully eased his way around the machines and wires surrounding his half-brother’s hospital bed, pulling an uncomfortable chair over and slouching down on it to wait.

John didn’t disappoint, and stopped faking sleep after less than a minute of staring on Shawn’s part.  John blinked groggily at Shawn, and Shawn revised his previous hypothesis from ‘faking sleep’ to ‘fighting to stay awake despite the best efforts of some really good drugs’ (all that hanging out with Rodney must be getting to him, Shawn decided, if he was saying things like ‘revising his previous hypothesis’ inside his own head).  

“Rodney?”  John rasped at Shawn hoarsely.

Shawn worried about the possibilities and probabilities of brain damage even as he fumbled with the pitcher and cup on the bedside table.  “No, I’m Shawn, remember?” he reminded John, feeling weirdly flustered at the thought of being forgotten so easily by someone he barely knew, who was only tied to him by a couple of alleles.  He finally managed to both fill the cup with water and align the straw with John’s mouth without any major incidents.

John took a long sip while managing to convey ‘I know that, dumbass,’ with only his eyebrows, a skill Shawn would most definitely like to pick up.  John swallowed and spat the straw out of his mouth to ask “Where is he?” in a voice that was already much less harsh, if really very worried with a definite undertone of doom and gloom pessimism.

“He’s still in surgery,” was all Shawn had to offer in answer.  They were awkwardly quiet for some infinitely long seconds before Shawn thought to add, “Carson doesn’t seem too worried, though.”  John relaxed infinitesimally with that assurance, and gestured high-handedly for Shawn to give him another sip of water.  “Bossy,” Shawn complained, muttering it under his breath, and caught the slight flicker of John’s mouth twisting wryly out of the corner of his eye, and hid a little upward lip-twitch of his own.  Would’ja look at that, they were bonding.  Kinda sorta.


	7. In which nobody likes being stuck in the infirmary

JOHN

After a day, Carson took him off the good drugs.  On the morphine blend, John’s nightmares—daymares—had been reliving hell, over and over, but the relief from the blinding fucking _agony_ radiating from his right thigh had almost made up for the mental torture.  As soon as the last of the drugs wore off, John broke into a cold sweat and clenched his jaw against the whimpers that wanted to escape.  He’d signed off on Carson’s policy about being sparing with the earth-based drugs when Carson came back as CMO—you never knew what was going to happen in Pegasus, or when you might be cut off from resupply for two years (again)—but he really, really hated that fucking policy right now and wished he’d never signed off on the damn thing.  

His system had metabolized the last of the cocktail at 02:23 (according to the glaringly bright digital clock someone had mounted on the wall of the infirmary) and the sudden onset of the pain had yanked him out of the restless doze he’d been slipping in and out of since Carson had first drugged him up.  It’d been around two hours (two hours, twelve minutes and 36, 37, 38 seconds; not that he was keeping track or anything) since he’d woken up.  The infirmary was quiet except for the steady beeping of Rodney’s heart monitor (or brain monitor—hell, it could be a high-tech thermometer for all he knew.  John had no clue what most of the machines in the infirmary were supposed to keep track of).  The night-shift doctor was probably holed up in Carson’s office doing paperwork, and the night-shift nurses were most likely inventorying the storerooms.  (Carson was a bear when it came to knowing what medical supplies were on hand—a policy John thoroughly approved of and frequently volunteered the Marines to help with when they were done with the armory.  The Marines weren‘t as fond of the policy.)  Now, normally John had nothing against a little good-natured complaining and annoying the infirmary staff, but god, seeing as how Rodney was in a fucking coma right next to him…  Complaining would divert their attention, and the faster Rodney got better, the less likely they all were to die.  Besides, John felt like he fucking deserved the pain for not getting Rodney out in time.  That was his job, goddammit, to protect Rodney—and all the other non-combatants—and he’d failed.  Major fucking big time, he’d failed.  

So John lay in his hospital bed next to Rodney’s, stoically enduring the pain that he rightfully deserved, with only the constant beeping from the machines surrounding Rodney to keep him company.  The beeping had the potential to be the most annoying thing he’d ever heard, except for the fact that it meant Rodney was still alive.  The silence between each beep was what grated on his nerves more than anything, because he spent it waiting for the next one, and hoping to god that it’d sound when the time for it came.  As time wore on, John grew to dread the silence between the beeps from Rodney’s machines enough to begin talking to fill it up.  His voice was hoarse with thirst and kept cracking whenever the pain in his leg spiked (he kept twitching, trying to move in a way that would ease the pain, even though all it did was make it spike, but he couldn’t seem to make his body stop doing it), but the only one around to hear was Rodney, and he wasn’t complaining about it.

John passed the rest of the abnormally long (to a body once again accustomed to Earth’s 24 hour days, as much as he might deny it) Atlantis night talking at Rodney, with intermittent breaks when the night-shift doctor made her rounds.  She’d given him water to ease his throat, and explained his injuries to him, not that he’d been paying attention to her jargon.  Carson would dumb it down for him later, regardless, so he just smiled and nodded until she left him alone with Rodney again and he resumed his one-sided conversation.  When morning finally arrived and the infirmary went back to its normal bustling frenzy, he’d talked himself to a standstill, his throat rasping in a way that had nothing to do with trauma from the blast.  He finished his litany of complaints, remembrances and bad jokes with an entreaty. “Come on, Rodney, wake up,” he pleaded quietly as the first of the morning shift started coming through the doors.  “We can’t do this without you—you’re the genius, remember?  Smartest man in two galaxies.  Wake up before we blow ourselves up, will you?”

John’s first visitor was Carson, who took one look at the monitors hooked up to him before grabbing the chart attached to the foot of John’s bed and glaring at it like it’d personally offended him, and then launched into a mild rant at John about how enduring excessive pain could slow down his recovery.  John tried to stare Carson down, but Carson just ignored him and injected something into the port in John’s IV.  John relaxed muscles he didn’t know he’d tensed as the warm bliss spread through his veins, and drifted off to sleep as soon as the pain eased a little.

He wasn’t awake for his second visitation, but when he woke up again, he found a hand-drawn card with a grinning stick figure wearing a cowboy hat and holding a surprisingly accurately drawn P-90.  The note inside was written in Jesse’s strangely neat handwriting (he didn’t know where _that_ had come from, his own handwriting was barely legible to his own eyes, most of the time) and just said _Get better soon, Dad.  Love Jesse._  Teyla and Torren and Ronon had all added their own marks, in their own languages, and John felt a wash of something go through him that almost overpowered the drugs.  It felt good, even as he ignored it.  Shawn had signed it too, which was weird, but kinda nice.  Looked like Shawn had gotten stuck with babysitting duty—though it probably felt the other way around to Jesse.  John grinned at the thought, and tucked the card under his pillow for safekeeping before drifting back to sleep.

The next visitor was Lorne, who stopped by when he woke up again, this time around lunch time (not that the infirmary staff would give John anything to eat, citing something about nutrients and drugs and stomachs that he paid about as much attention to as it deserved: exactly none), long enough to drop off a tablet filled with paperwork and shoot John a smug grin and an innocent, “Just in case you get bored, sir, you could always get ahead on your paperwork.”  Asshole.   Over half of the paperwork on the tablet was Lorne’s, it looked like.  Though John guessed it was fair enough, considering how much paperwork he’d pushed off on Lorne over the years—but John had always had a valid excuse, like alien invasion.  Lorne was just being a jerk.  John scowled at his rapidly retreating back, then eyed the tablet with a muted hatred, before opening the first file in the queue.  He was already in agony, so what was a little more?

The last visitor of the day, though, wasn’t for John.  Morris stopped by to see Rodney, and managed to ignore John thoroughly enough for most of the visit that he felt like he wasn’t even there (an impression the drugs didn’t do anything to dispel, making the world look fuzzy and only half corporeal), even though his bed was less than five feet away from where Morris was sitting hunched over by Rodney‘s bed, a hangdog expression on his face.  John wasn’t quite sure what to make of being ignored so totally, but the new cocktail Carson had him on made it hard to stay lucid long enough to address it even if he wanted to.  Morris did make a point to call him “Sir” and ask him how he was ‘getting on’ when he left, though, so maybe the cocktail had more to do with his impression of being ignored than reality did.  Morris’s visit might not have been the last of the day, but it was the last one that John was even remotely conscious for.  After Morris left, Carson stopped by long enough to inject something new into John’s IV port, and he went out like a light.


	8. In which Rodney regains his snark

SHAWN

He tried not to let it get to him most of the time, but it was painfully obvious that Shawn was only on Atlantis as part and parcel of Eliot’s benefits package.  Sure, he could make the sparkly things light up for the scientists (which incidentally also sometimes made them—the scientists as well as the occasional Ancient doodad—squeal like 10 year old girls; those days were always fun.  Also, sometimes death-defying), but there was only so much of the day he could spend trapped in a lab playing light switch before he started feeling the urge to break stuff (on purpose, as opposed to normally).  And honestly, being the resident lab light switch wasn’t a highly challenging job description—he held the things they gave him to hold, thought ‘On’ at said things, and then A) threw them away from himself in terror (the scientists had had a pretty steep learning curve in regards to standing him beside a containment chamber, after he discovered that first Ancient grenade—Lab 7 would never be the same again) or B) listened to what said things told him they did and then turned around told the eager, interchangeable scientists hovering nearby (though usually on the opposite side of Shawn as the containment chamber) what the sparkly Ancient artifact had told him.  Ironically, his job highly resembled a few of the ‘séances’ he’d performed for Psych clients in the past, only this time, he wasn’t pretending to be psychic.  The inanimate objects really were talking to him in his head.  (Gus would love it—he was, after all, the one who’d pounded the definition of irony into Shawn’s head.  Because, well, there was remembering information, and there was remembering _correct_ information.)

Another duty Shawn had picked up over the bare month they’d been in the city was one he still wasn’t sure if he resented or not.  Shawn spent the majority of the time he didn’t spend chained in the labs babysitting his nephew.  Because Shawn was apparently Atlantis’s new manny.

He doubted that the immeasurable weight of the knowledge of the complete inconsequentialness of his entire existence on Atlantis would be as hard to bear if he actually saw Eliot for more than a few rushed minutes in the mornings (the occasional glimpses of him across the mess hall didn’t count) within the past month—this even with the fact Big Brother had officially roomed them together in a suite with only one bed.  

Hell, they’d promised Shawn _spaceships_ he could _control with his mind_ to get him here, and they wouldn’t even let him fly them.

Shawn loved the Puddle Jumpers with a truly _desperate_ passion, one which only another stealth-geek could ever truly understand.  While they wouldn’t let him fly (and he was really starting to think it was long past time to play the sibling card and see how that worked with Big Brother in regards to that particular issue—surely a genetic love for flying would be believable, considering how much it obviously pained John to be denied the Jumpers until he was fully recovered from the rescue mission—two weeks and counting—though maybe reminding him that the fact he couldn’t fly at the moment was kinda sorta Shawn’s fault would be a step in the wrong direction), he still spent as much time as possible with them.  He spent up to half of every day he’d been on Atlantis in the Jumper bay, communing with them and cajoling them for flight simulations, even if it was against their programming.  (Jumper Two was the most rebellious of the lot, and let him pilot the simulated flights almost every time he asked, so she was his favorite.)  

Shawn had never read the Warrior Angel comics or taken a side in the perennial Superman vs. Batman debate in grade school (or in the corridors of Atlantis—he’d blame the scientists, but really, the Marines were even worse, and Big Brother was their king) but late at night while Shawn was growing up, after Henry was finally really asleep and no longer faking, Shawn would sneak downstairs to watch reruns of classic Star Trek.  The foundation of his love for the Jumpers probably stemmed from devouring Heinlen and Asimov and Card and all the space operas he could get his hands on, sequestered in a reading carrel at the public library while Gus covered for him with Henry.  Shawn had even adored the low-budget, hokey, Air Force-sanctioned Wormhole X-Treme, even before he’d known it was plausible deniability in a box and had just thought it was a cheesy Star Trek rip-off.  

So really, living in the lost city of Atlantis, a giant, flying, space-worthy _city_ , just made it worse.  He was here on sufferance, and all the best parts of her were just out of his reach, and felt like they always would be.  If he wasn’t allowed to fly a Jumper for the daily taxi trip to the mainland, how was anyone ever going to think he could possibly be trusted with something interesting or exciting or worthwhile, like the Chair?  

 

Shawn had a routine, though not one he was particularly fond of.  He’d wake up about halfway every morning as soon as Eliot rolled out of bed (bright eyed and bushy tailed, goddamn him for falling for a morning person), and make an effort to try and keep his lover in bed long enough for a proper wake up, or at least a “Good morning.”  For his efforts, he’d invariably end up with a quick kiss on the cheek and a fond noogie of his sleep-rumpled hair as Eliot dashed out the door, with morning sex as distant a possibility as finding a Starbucks on New Athos.  Shawn would then try to fall back asleep, but by the time Eliot was out the door the bed was always too big and too cold to allow it.  Once Shawn finally dragged himself out of bed and through a bleary shower, a quick bite grabbed at the mess hall meant he was, most days, already running late to the lab.  

Jesse seemed to have a sixth sense for when Shawn was ready to commit cold-blooded murder, because the kid always managed to turn up at the lab right around when Shawn started thinking seriously about throwing one of the dangerous artifacts towards the hovering scientists rather than the containment chamber, their unceasing mantra of _‘Can’t you hold onto it a few more seconds before throwing the exploding thing away?  We need to run some more tests’_ as vile as the stench in the back corridors of a Wraith cruiser.  Jesse sometimes wandered down to the lab by himself (with a watchful Marine or five ‘just happening’ to be wandering in the same direction) or one of John’s friends would drop him off when they were done ‘teaching’ him (Shawn had tagged along to a few of Jesse’s ‘classes’, and really, the kid was so much brighter than most of the people teaching him it was scary.  The only time he really seemed to be learning something rather than teaching it was his stick-hitty lessons with Teyla.  Apparently, in the Pegasus galaxy, it was appropriate to teach a rugrat how to take down a gun-wielding adult with just a stick.  Considering the Wraith, though, Shawn wasn’t too sure they were wrong.)  

If Jesse arrived at the labs close enough to lunchtime, the two of them would hit the mess hall straight away.  If not, they would hide in the Jumper bay until their stomachs began complaining too loudly to ignore.  After lunch, Jesse and Shawn would always return to the Jumper bay, regardless of how much time they might have already spent there on that particular day.  Jesse tended to spend his time crawling all over the ships (both inside and out, and not excluding the control panels or investigations of the crystal array trays, though Shawn was usually commanded to perform step-ladder duties in order for Jesse to reach the trays) looking for things he’d forgotten to include in the design schematic for his mini-Puddle Jumper, a project in which he told Shawn there was ‘always room for more ‘provements’, even if it was still back on Earth hidden in the SGC’s vault until he could convince someone to have it sent through the wormhole for him.  

Shawn spent most of his time in the Jumper bay (time he wasn’t acting as a step-ladder, that is) dozing in Jumper Two’s pilot seat between flight simulations, at least until Atlantis would let him know with a mental nudge if Jesse needed him or if someone was looking for them.  When people started looking for either of them, Atlantis would give them a heads-up so they could clear out of the Jumper bay before anyone noticed them on the bio-signs sensors.  If anyone ever discovered that this was where they spent the majority of their days, no one would ever leave them alone.  Once Atlantis had warned them, Shawn and Jesse would play Hide From The Scientists until dinner.  (Jesse was a completely willing participant in the game, since he was co-opted to use his magic gene to turn things on in the lab almost as often as Shawn was.  Luckily, for Jesse at least, the kid could quote the American child labor laws in exacting detail, as well as being able to freely invoke the wrath of the McKay, the combination of which managed to scare the scientists off often enough he rarely actually had to turn things on even after the scientists had managed to get him into the actual labs.)  Dinner was when one or more of the lurking scientists would usually manage to corner Shawn and drag him back to the lab, and John (though sometimes Teyla or Kanaan, with Torren in tow) would collect Jesse, as the cold-hearted child abandoned Shawn to his dismal and fluorescently-lit lab-based fate.  

Over the past two weeks, most, if not all of Shawn and Jesse’s Hide From The Scientists time was spent in the infirmary, visiting McKay.  Surprisingly enough, even after the word had gotten out that that was where Shawn and Jesse could be found if someone was looking for them, the scientists wouldn’t dare to come and get them.  Even in a coma, McKay inspired fear and abject worship in his minions, and was an invincible protection.  Enough so that Shawn really started contemplating dragging the gurney to the mess hall with him for meals so the scientists couldn’t get their grubby little hands on him there—or just having dinner in the infirmary.  

Shawn didn’t really see the point of the daily visits, considering McKay was in a coma, butJesse insisted that ‘Uncle Kay’ would get lonely, otherwise, so Shawn just went along with it.  Who was he to tell Jesse that coma patients didn’t respond to outside stimuli?  Considering the kid’s IQ, Jesse probably knew more about it than Shawn did.  He liked McKay, himself (thought he was funny as hell, in fact—at least when he was conscious), but was mildly surprised at how attached Jesse seemed to be.  Though, once again considering the kid’s IQ, McKay was probably the only person around who could still teach him things, so maybe the attachment wasn’t so surprising after all.

 

By now, Shawn knew what it felt like when Atlantis was talking to him.  It wasn’t so much _talking_ , per se, but he’d get an itchy feeling in the back of his brain, and he’d understand what she was trying to tell him.  She didn’t speak in words so much as a subliminally fast montage of images he could only almost see, but that would manage to convey her meaning nonetheless.  

However, this didn’t feel like that.  The more time he’d spent with Jesse, the more he’d feel like he was only hearing half a conversation, and that through a thick door and some seriously soundproofed walls—kind of like when he used to try to listen in on something happening in one of the interrogation rooms at the SBPD from its observation room with the intercom turned off.  It wasn’t until Shawn noticed that Jesse always reacted to those soft static bursts—if they were in the Puddle Jumpers, he’d pull up a new floor panel to trace some conduits, or flip down a hidden crystal tray—that Shawn realized he actually was almost-hearing half a conversation.  The fact that it was near-constant when he was around Jesse was a little disturbing, considering how much effort it seemed to take on both Shawn and Atlantis’s parts when they tried to communicate with each other.

 _Why do you talk to Jesse so much?_   Shawn thought at Atlantis.

She answered (relatively) slowly, taking as much as a full second to either ponder his question or try to parse together an answer.  A flash of medical textbooks (his mom’s, she must have found that one in his own mind), a montage of children’s books with their bright colors and large fonts and larger pictures, children’s drawings, an adult (Shawn, though he was stitched into someone else’s memory) at a study table in a university library with books piled all around him, a kid (Jesse) doodling a smiley face in the dirt with a stick, a bright, uncomplicated smile on his face.   _He doesn’t think in words, yet,_ was the essence of what Shawn thought Atlantis was trying to tell him.

 _Well, shit,_ Shawn thought to himself.  Or thought he thought to himself.

“Don’t swear,” Jesse told him severely, or as severely as a five-year-old could when he’d probably just had a picture of a steaming pile of dog poop shoved into his brain, along with a giant question mark and probably a recap of Shawn and Atlantis’s conversation.  Shawn made a face at the kid, and Jesse busted a gut, shrieking “Poop!” before he collapsed to the floor of the Jumper in a fit of giggles.  Shawn couldn’t have stopped himself from joining in Jesse’s laughter, even if he’d wanted to.  He had few enough things to laugh about these days to pass up this one.

 

JOHN

When Rodney woke up from his coma, two weeks and one day after the explosion on the Wraith ship, John wasn’t there.  His son and his half-brother were, though, and Atlantis transmitted Jesse’s gleeful shriek of “Uncle Kay!” straight from the audio pickups in the infirmary to the radio in John’s ear.  Along with the somewhat deeper, and significantly more worrisome, “I can’t believe that worked,” and the familiar raspy tenor that stabbed him straight though the heart demanding, “What the hell took you idiots so long?”

Needless to say, John dropped what he was doing (luckily it was only a clipboard of packing slips from the last grocery run—he’d been taking his frustrations out on the inventory checklists) and raced for the infirmary.  Arriving breathless and heaving, he braced himself in the doorway of Rodney’s isolation room, staring at the tableau that greeted him as almost all of the occupants of the room froze and looked at him guiltily.  Well, two of them.  Jesse and Shawn.  Rodney was trying to fend off Carson, and Carson seemed to be attempting to draw some blood.  Not that he really needed to, seeing how it was perfectly obvious what had happened, what with the wires coming from a control panel in the infirmary wall that had been jammed into Rodney’s _wrist_ with all the care McKay usually had for punctuality.  Oddly enough, however, Rodney, the hypochondriac, appeared to be completely fine with the whole thing, since he kept telling Carson that they had to stay in—with no accompanying explanation of why—whenever Carson so much as twitched toward his wrist.

John caught his breath, and put it to good use.  “Does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?” he boomed pointedly at his son and bastard brother, tacking on a heartfelt but careless sounding, “nice of you to finally wake up, Rodney.  Enjoy your beauty rest?”

Luckily for Jesse and Shawn, Rodney responded to John’s rhetorical question with an acidic comment that back-burnered John’s ire at his kin.  “Yes, I had a nice restful coma while the artificial intelligence of the Wraith cruiser tried to re-write my DNA with extreme prejudice and a poorly engineered nanovirus, while _talking the entire time._  Let’s just say that its witty repartee left something to be desired.”  

John could only stare, gape-mouthed, feeling like a big-mouthed bass.  


	9. In which meetings are really just a giant waste of time

JOHN

John finally managed to crank his jaw shut and stop imitating a fish, though not quite as soon after Rodney’s bombshell as he would have liked.  He directed a quick and only mildly panicked glance over at Carson, half worried that the coma had snapped something in Rodney’s brain and that their CSO was now bat-shit insane, and half worried that it hadn’t.  John didn’t know which would be worse.  This was Pegasus though, after all, so who the fuck knew.  Carson was no help—the man was staring at Rodney with the same expression John guessed was on his own face, and wasn’t meeting John’s eyes.

Rodney rolled his eyes at the both of them and growled something under his breath—probably derisive and insulting and about their combined IQs, if his tone was any indication—and gave a tug on the wall-end of the wires feeding into his wrist.  The wires unspooled or stretched or something, and Rodney started to swing his legs over the side of his bed.  Rodney’s movement seemed to jar Carson back to reality, and he took control of the room with his customary iron fist.  “You stop right there, lad,” he commanded Rodney, then began to shoo the rest of them out of the room.  When Rodney tried to protest, Carson cut him off before he’d even managed to say something (quite a feat, with Rodney).  “Unless you _want_ the Colonel and his family here while I give you a once over and remove your catheter, then by all means, Rodney, of course they can stay,” Carson told Rodney with deceptive kindness, and Rodney stopped protesting and John stopped ignoring Carson’s attempts to shoo them out.  Friendship only went so far, and definitely not as far as catheter removal.  There were some thing a man just didn’t need to see, and a big ass needle being stuck in another guy’s dick was one of them.  

“I’ll be back with Woolsey and Zelenka for your debrief as soon as Carson’s done with you, Rodney,” John shot back into the room before he shut the door, “and you better have a fucking good story as an excuse for playin’ hooky for two weeks, man.  I’m pretty sure Zelenka spent the whole time cursing me out in Czech,” he muttered to himself after the door hissed shut.

A stifled giggle coming from somewhere around his knees reminded John that he had company—and a fully legitimate reason to vent the storm of emotions currently knotting up his intestines.  “What.  The _hell_.  Were you thinking?” he asked his bastard brother as evenly as he could manage, including Jesse in the question with a sharp glance.  John knew his son, and was fully aware that there was a less than zero percent chance his kid had only been along for the ride.  Shawn straightened his spine and opened his mouth to respond, but John cut him off with a quick slash of his hand through the air.  “You know what, no.  Not here.”  He’d realized, thankfully before the explanations had started spilling out, that they were in public and John had no clue whether this was going to be classified information or not.  They needed privacy, and even though it stuck in his craw, he should wait for Zelenka and Woolsey.  They’d have different points of view and would bring insights to the table that he couldn’t—John was hardwired by now to think in terms of strategy and tactics and military applications, and other viewpoints would be helpful.  As would witnesses, in case John felt the urge to commit fratricide or lock Jesse in the brig until he was thirty.  “Go to Conference Room B.  I’ll meet you there.  If anyone tries to stop you, you feel free to tell them—no,” John paused when he caught sight of Morris lurking in the hallway outside the infirmary.  “Morris!  Escort these two to Conference Room B.  No side trips, other than to the head.”  

The partners in crime safely disposed of, John gripped the sides of his head in an attempt to keep his skull from exploding.  God.  Was this what Elizabeth had felt like when dealing with him and Rodney?  No wonder she’d always looked frazzled.

 

It didn’t take much negotiating to get Carson to bring Rodney up to the conference room, even though the man had been in a coma not two hours previous.  The difficult part had been explaining the need to move Rodney to Atlantis, because even if John had wanted to do this all in the infirmary, there wasn’t enough room for all of them to fit.  Finally, Atlantis understood the need and managed to pause whatever she was doing to Rodney’s genetic code (which, you know, scared the shit out of John, but whatever fix she was jerry-rigging was obviously working, so it wasn’t like he could just tell her to stop and send Rodney back into a coma) long enough for Carson to stick Rodney in a wheelchair and zip him through the transporters to the conference room.  As soon as they entered the conference room, a panel slid open in the middle of the wall and wires obligingly unspooled.  Carson inserted the wires into the raw wounds in Rodney’s arm with a grimace, and John clamped down on the vague nausea that surged in his stomach at the sight.

Once they were all seated around the table, Shawn fidgeting like he was the five year old and not Jesse, John let out a long breath in an attempt to calm himself.  Jesus.  “Ok,” he started.  “Someone start explaining.  Tell me why stabbing Rodney with _parts of Atlantis_ seemed like a good idea,” he directed at his relatives, “what the hell you meant when you said the Wraith ship was talking to you in your coma,” John looked at Rodney, “and for those of you just tuning in,” he looked over at Woolsey and Zelenka, who were both obviously bursting with questions, “you now know as much as I do.”  John clenched his fists on the table in the second or two of silence that followed.  “What the fuck is going on, here?” he asked the room at large as quietly as he could when it looked like no one was going to speak up.  Jesse’s eyes got big and doe-like, Shawn fidgeted some more, and Rodney looked like he was completely zoned out, staring over John’s head with a distracted expression.  When the others on Rodney’s side of the table (Carson, Zelenka and Jesse) started staring off at the same spot over John’s head, however, he turned around.  

One of Atlantis’s clear monitors was descending quietly from the ceiling, like a projection screen in a college auditorium.  Inside his head, he felt Atlantis volunteering to explain if he would sit in the Chair for her.  The monitor flashed the database’s matrix-like startup screen before displaying blueprints of something that looked vaguely like a Wraith Hive as she continued to cajole John into going to the chair room.  He resisted for a few seconds before huffing out a breath of assent.  “Atlantis says she’s going to explain.  I’ll be in the Chair,” he rolled his eyes.

Woolsey’s shrug looked about as helpless as John felt at the moment.  “Hopefully the city will have enough information to make sense of this,” he agreed with John and waved him off.  “I will get the human side of the story, Colonel Sheppard.”  John left his family to Woolsey’s interrogative mercies and headed for the transporter nearest the conference room.

 

The Chair hadn’t even started reclining when Atlantis began bombarding John with equations and formulae so complex he could barely comprehend the structure of them, let alone their function or meaning.  The equations glowed electric blue against the darkness of his mind, graven so deeply in his consciousness that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget them.  His mind was silent for a few microseconds after the incomprehensible equations stopped unfurling across the clean slate of the back of his eyelids before Atlantis let out what he could only describe as a huff at his incomprehension.  She minimized the equations to the side of his mind, highlighting them for him with a memory marker so he’d be able to look at them again later.  (She’d taken to Rodney’s homebuilt OS the whole base used like a fish to water, and had started ‘minimizing’ conversations for him so he’d be able to recall them in their entirety later.  John couldn’t decide if he thought it was adorable, helpful, or creepy.)

The montage of images and clips that flashed through his brain next were oddly familiar, which distracted him from their content long enough that Atlantis noticed and paused long enough to throw up a brief screenshot of the base’s communal servers’ directory, before resuming her collage.  The flashes she was showing him now were clips and stills from pretty much every science fiction show (most likely illegally) downloaded to the servers, with high concentrations of Doctor Who, Torchwood and Star Trek, along with occasional flashes of scanned comic book pages.  It was the comics that finally clued him in, once he recognized that all the pages were from the DC Crisis on Infinite Earths story arc.  

 _Alternate or parallel universe?_ he asked her silently, and received a brief affirmative before the Cardiff Rift from _Torchwood_ hung solitary in his mind.   _So, a rift between alternate universes?_  Another affirmative, and John realized he was effectively playing Pictionary with the artificial intelligence of a flying alien city.  Story of his life, he thought.  John figured, with all the time he’d spent in Pegasus, he’d stop being surprised when things like the fate of the universe would depend on his ability to play a drunken party game.

There was an unfamiliar sensation in his head, and John got the uneasy feeling that Atlantis thought his martyr complex was adorable.

 

SHAWN

Big Brother came back from his communion with the city looking shaken.  He’d been gone for all of ten minutes, but apparently that was enough time for the city to rock his world.  But John’s disturbed demeanor wasn’t what had Shawn on the edge of his seat.  Rather, it was the realization that Eliot’s team was due back within the hour, and that El was probably not going to too ecstatic regarding Shawn’s extracurricular activities of the day.  Shawn doubted he’d get off as easy as Eliot never finding out—he just wasn’t that lucky.  No, El was gonna hop on his high horse and probably lecture Shawn about responsibility or something again.  Seemed like the only times he saw El anymore was when he was asleep or belatedly scared out of his mind for Shawn (which usually came off as ‘enraged at Shawn’, which wasn’t the most pleasant thing ever even when Shawn knew why El was acting all pissed), and this was probably going to fall under option number two as soon as El got back to the city and got wind of it.  

Doctor Z brought Shawn’s attention back to what was going on around him with a high pitched exclamation in Czech that Shawn was almost certain translated as ‘Yes, oh my god, fuck, yes!’ (Shawn knew this because it sounded almost exactly like what the student ambassador from Czechoslovakia had screamed that one night Gus had convinced Shawn to visit Gus in college when Shawn hadn’t actually gotten past the first room in Gus’s dorm hall.  Good times.  He’d gone back the next night to actually visit Gus, with a really good excuse involving a raccoon, a squirrel, a jar of peanutbutter and a Molokov cocktail, because what Gus didn’t know didn’t hurt Shawn in the form of wooby!Gus giving Shawn the silent treatment.)  At times like now, Shawn was actually a little grateful for his Henry’s training of Shawn’s eidetic memory.  He rewound the past minute to figure out what had gotten Doctor Z so very, very excited, and remembered Big Brother saying something about travel between multiple universes.  Caught up now, Shawn started paying real attention to what John was saying.

“The Wraith ships weren’t designed or built by the Wraith.  Like the Go’aould, the Wraith are mostly technological scavengers, not developers.  Their ships aren’t even built, they’re _born_.  They’re a species, an _intelligent_ and _sentient_ species that somehow migrated between their universe and ours, and got captured and enslaved by the Wraith.  Atlantis says they’re pretty much insane now, most of them, except for maybe the really really young ones, because they need some sort of partner or symbiote or something to survive.  The Ancients came across the ship-creatures before they even started trying for ascension, so I think they might have met them before the Wraith even existed.  Atlantis flagged a lot of entries in the Ancient database for Linguistics to translate for us that relate to the ships.” Shawn’s brother stopped talking and stared around the table for a moment.  He was met by dumbfounded silence.  “Oh,” John continued, like he’d just remembered something, “Atlantis said, Rodney, that the cruiser was trying to turn you into one of those companions that it seems to need.  So, yeah.  No more sticking body parts into Wraith ships, anyone.”  John fell silent again, and Shawn silently marveled at the way John had managed to say all that without sounding like he belonged in an asylum.  He was starting to get how everyone around here just shrugged the strangeness off—because things like this _happened all the time_ in the Pegasus galaxy.  Shawn was pretty sure that if there was a God, the Pegasus galaxy was a _much_ better indication that he/she/it had a (really fucking twisted) sense of humor than the freaking _platypus_.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, tiny fusion with Farscape now? Maybe? (Don't look at me)


	10. In which Eliot behaves suspiciously

SHAWN

Eliot hadn’t actually flipped out at Shawn once he’d heard what’d happened—which was about a second or two after he stepped through the gate.  (Shawn was pretty sure that the gossip network of Atlantis was facilitated by the city herself, the way news traveled so fast through the city.)  Eliot had actually had his post-mission medical exam, showered, changed, and debriefed before hunting Shawn down and calmly asking him if he was alright, before grinning at his answer and giving Shawn a blatant one-armed shoulder hug and an affectionate kiss on the side of his head—right in the middle of the lab.  The _lab_ , where everyone was looking at them.  Eliot was being cuddly with Shawn in public.  

Shawn pulled back with horror, staring dumbly at the stranger pretending to be El, and tried to figure out what the fuck had happened on that off-world mission.  Maybe his post-mission doc had missed a Go’a’ould scar.  Shawn smiled brightly back at him, lecherously even, and took El by the hand and led him in the general direction of the lab exit, like he was a horny boyfriend looking for a quickie.  Eliot laughed and followed him and didn’t even try to tug his hand away, and Shawn knew something was definitely horribly wrong with a capital WRONG.  As they passed Simpson’s workstation by the exit, Shawn snatched the reassembled Ancient (and very Star Trek-esque) phaser she’d been working on, thumbed it to stun, and laid El (or the thing pretending to be him) out flat before he could so much as twitch.

Or at least, he would have, if Simpson had reassembled the damn thing right. _Goddammit.  Again?  Really?_ Shawn groaned mentally in the split second between when the phaser whined and sparked ominously and when the charge short-circuited backwards through the grip.

Shawn woke up in the infirmary, again, in an isolation room and cuffed to his gurney.  Something beeped somewhere out of sight, and something else rattled off to his left.  He turned toward the rattling, and saw the thing that looked like El cuffed to another gurney not two feet away from him.  With a startled squawk, Shawn shied away, as far from that side of his gurney as he could get, seeing as he was cuffed to the rails of the stupid hospital bed.  At the noise, El slowly rolled his head to look at Shawn, and the glare of absolute fury he leveled at Shawn did a damn sight more to reassure Shawn that this was his Eliot than the lack of glowing eyes or booming voice, but he still wasn’t entirely convinced.  Maybe someone on the planet had drugged the team up.  

“Did one of those native hussies drug you up again?” Shawn led off with.  “Or did they extract the Go’a’ould while I was out?  Did you go on a killing rampage before someone caught you?  Did you kill Simpson?  Because she almost deserves it—for a double Ph.D. she really sucks at reading schematics,” he finished, muttering the last part to himself.

Carson bustled into the room, with Big Brother following warily, but Eliot ignored the both of them to keep glaring at Shawn.  “No, the natives didn’t drug me, I don’t have another fucking snake in my brain, and I didn’t go on a killing rampage!  What the fuck, Shawn?  What the hell is wrong with you?”  Eliot growled at him, eyes practically blazing with anger.

“What’s wrong with _me_?” Shawn yelped.  “What’s wrong with _you_?  You hugged—El, you _kissed_ my _head_ in the _lab_ , for Christ’s sake!  What am I supposed to think—of course you’re possessed by some alien intelligence with a subpar ability to access your memories!”  He looked at John quickly, frantic, “Maybe he’s a Replicator, maybe they’re back and better at pretending to be human, now?”  Of course Shawn had read the reports—he’d read the city’s entire database of mission reports by now (hello, speedreading), and knew pretty much everything and anything they could be in for now.  “My Eliot doesn’t _do_ that, hell, _my_ Eliot’s about to fucking break up with me, _hello_.  You suck at pretending to be him, by the way.  You didn’t even yell at me when you found me in the lab—I let a five-year-old kid talk me into plugging the city into Rodney—a guy in a _coma_ —like he had a USB port hidden in his wrist—which he doesn’t, by the way, and let me tell you, that was one of the grossest things I have ever seen in my life.  Eliot Spencer would have ripped me a new one for something like that.  You’re not him.”

Big Brother was starting to look a little more worried with every point Shawn brought up—he could tell that Shawn was making sense (obviously, duh) and John had edged in front of Carson and was resting his hand lightly on the gun in his thigh-holster by the time Shawn had finished speaking.  

The Eliot clone groaned and banged his head back against the pillow.  “Shawn, I swear, your conspiracy theories get more fucked up every day.  I’m not fucking breaking up with you.”  He sounded resigned, and much more like the El Shawn knew, but earlier had been too big of a fuckup to cover up now, even for a crazy-smart alien robot.  

“Of course you’re not breaking up with me,” Shawn replied matter-of-factly, ignoring the clenching in his chest at airing his dirty laundry in front of other people.  The Eliot clone looked a little relieved, until Shawn continued, “You’re not Eliot.  He’s who’s breaking up with me, it’s pretty damn obvious,” John dipped his head in a partial nod before Shawn narrowed his eyes at him and Big Brother caught himself actually participating in a conversation about _feelings_ and slapped the stoic mask of indifference back in place.  That was more like it.  One possessed person today was enough.  Shawn turned his glare back on the Eliot clone, who looked like someone had just stabbed him in the kidney with something really blunt and painful, the Eliot clone’s eyes darting from Shawn to John to Carson (who had also nodded in agreement, the dick, but at least he was a clone who was on their side, unlike this one) and back to Shawn again.  “You’re not breaking up with me because you’re not El and you’ve never been anything to me, dumbass,” Shawn finished.

The Eliot clone gritted his teeth and turned away from Shawn to look up at where John was hovering protectively in front of Carson.  “John- Colonel Sheppard.  Sir.  I brought Shawn to the infirmary myself when he stunned himself—like the _idiot he is_ —and threatened everyone who came near him until they took me seriously about treating him.  I would really like to rip Simpson apart with my bare hands, but McKay’s probably better suited to that than I am.  I let the nurses cuff me to the damn gurney to make Shawn feel better when he started babbling this nonsense in his sleep when he started coming to an _hour_ ago.  You don’t honestly believe this shit, do you?  And,” here he turned to glare at Shawn, “I’m not fucking breaking up with you, you psychotic little freak, no matter _which_ Eliot you think you’re talking to, _none_ of them are breaking up with you!  I kissed you in the lab, you fucktard, because I’ve barely seen you in two months and I’ve got five days of leave, starting tomorrow, approved for the both of us as a surprise, and I was going to take you back to Santa Barbara for Gus’s fucking birthday, asshat.”  Eliot glared at Shawn malevolently. 

“Someone’s been spending a little too much time with the Marines,” someone muttered under their breath in a suspiciously Scottish accent, breaking the growing tension in the silence as Shawn and Eliot stared at each other.

Shawn bit the inside of his cheek, and glanced at his brother.  John had unobtrusively edged from in front of Carson until he was back to standing beside him, and looked about as sheepish as the military commander of a sentient flying city stationed in a foreign galaxy probably could (it came off more like constipation, but Shawn had learned John’s tells pretty well by now).  “He requested the leave two months ago,” John muttered.  “I may have been sworn to secrecy and scheduled him for more missions to make up for the leave.”

“And you just forgot to mention this when I started crying evil clone?” Shawn asked incredulously.  “No offense, Carson,” he added, wincing at the belated realization of exactly how un-PC that really was.  Carson shrugged an unconcerned shoulder at Shawn and Eliot darted an incredulous look at first Shawn, then Carson, before his face gradually settled back into its current default expression of ‘extremely pissed off’.  Apparently he hadn’t read those mission reports on the backup servers.

“What?” John exclaimed defensively, “it’s a thing!  That shit happens here!  This is Pegasus—better safe than sorry, and better sorry than dead or possessed or turned into some weird mutant,” he shrugged.  

Shawn considered this admittedly valid logic for a moment before mimicking John’s shrug.  “Ok, yeah, I’ll give you that.”  Eliot looked livid, and Carson rolled his eyes.

Carson got all up in Shawn’s face and broke out the penlight to check the reaction times of Shawn’s pupils while Shawn grumbled and John broke out the handcuff keys and freed the both of them.  “Of course, while you were unconscious I took the precaution of testing the both of you rather extensively for external influences, as the security footage looked more damning on your part than on Corporal Spencer’s, and he insisted I might as well do your pre-Earth departure physicals early.  You’ll be pleased to know that neither of you are possessed, clones, robots, allergic to anything new, contagious in any way, or pregnant, and that you can leave for Earth as soon as I’ve released you and you’ve packed.”  Shawn choked a little at the ‘pregnant’ bit, and Carson eyed him ruefully.  “Like the Colonel said, it’s Pegasus.  You’d be surprised.  Why do you think we want urine samples with all the post-mission physicals?  It’s not like there are many Earth recreational drugs out here, and not like we can do much about the native ones active-duty personnel are required by foreign cultures to consume while off-world, usually on pain of death or a broken trade-agreement, other than bring them down as best we can once they get back to us.”  

Shawn’s mind was still blown completely off the topic they’d been discussing earlier.  “But that’s not something that’s actually _happened_ , though, I read the reports and didn’t see-“

John snorted, obviously eavesdropping on a private conversation.  Shawn looked over at him and saw that Eliot was already gone, shit—Shawn was still trapped here being blinded by the stupid penlight, and couldn’t run after him.  He’d have to wait to find him after Carson let him go.  “You’ve only read Atlantis’s mission reports,” John said, derailing Shawn’s train of thought.  He listened rather than running after Eliot, because it wasn’t like Carson would let him go before he was done doing his doctor-y things.  John continued, “There’s over fifteen years of mission reports from the SGC on Earth you haven’t touched.  Believe me, if you can imagine it, it’s probably happened to either some poor Marine or to Doctor Jackson.”

“Speaking of doctors,” Shawn was abruptly reminded of the crap-fest his life was at the moment, though he made a mental note to look up this Doctor Jackson character’s mission reports the next time he was bored and tooling around the database looking for entertainment, since he sounded like a kindred soul if Shawn had ever heard one, “I’m guessing the leave’s off, what with McKay being a life-sized flash drive right now, huh.”  

Not only did he apparently get the completely wrong idea with this whole thing with Eliot and mistake the lead-up to a possibly romantic getaway (much more likely that it would turn into a working vacation when either the SBPD or El’s gang of merry men called them in for help on a case) as the lead-up to a breakup, but accused his… El/person/man-friend/partner/thing… of being an evil alien robot clone intent on a massive rampaging killing spree and was subsequently taken seriously.  Shawn wasn’t sure which was worse.  He’d definitely never had to worry about the latter back when he was working as a freelance private psychic detective for the SBPD instead of a civilian contractor of the US Air Force hired to talk to technology with his brain because his mom cheated on his dad with the base’s commanding officer’s dick-bag of a father when said dick-bag’s wife was dying with cancer and as such had the magic gene to activate alien technology with his brain.  Yeah.  This was a new thing for him.  At least Shawn never made the same mistake twice—not unless it was on purpose.  So when he caught up with Eliot he could reassure him that this, at least, specific idiocy wasn’t going to happen again.  Either idiocy.  Hopefully.  And hopefully Eliot would listen and not have disappeared off to who the hell knows where to avoid Shawn and spending a vacation with him after Shawn had made such a giant fucked up mess of his romantic-ish and thoughtful gesture.

Shawn groaned and hid his face in his hands—luckily Carson had taken the penlight away or his melodramatic gesture would have probably impaled it rather non-melodramatically in his eye on accident.  “I’ve fucked up big-time, haven’t I,” he asked the room rhetorically, under his breath.

“No,” John answered shortly.

“That was rhetorical, _Big Brother_ ,” Shawn glared over at him, “you’re supposed to manfully reassure me with your stoic silence that everything will be alright and that I will manage to fix my big gay fucked up relationship all by myself without having to ask Henry or anyone else for relationship advice ever again.”

“Or that,” John agreed easily, though he gave Shawn a strange look.  “But I was actually answering your question about the leave, and not whatever the fuck you muttered after it,” well, that probably explained the strange look, if he hadn’t heard Shawn’s rhetorical question and been blindsided with Shawn’s ranting rantyness.  “If we put off taking leave until nothing weird was going on, no one here would ever get time off.”  The man did have a point.  “And plus, I think having you and Jesse in separate galaxies for five days will only result in good things,” John added with a slight narrowing of his eyes, and Shawn abruptly recalled that morning’s events—was that really only a few hours ago?  Maybe he’d lost some time, somewhere—and the fact that he was probably going to be on John’s shit list for the forseeable future.  Visiting Earth would be a good thing.  Give the big bro some space, and a little time to calm down.  Hopefully before anyone reminds him that he’s actually kind of technically also Shawn’s boss and can probably make his life miserable for the forseeable future in an extremely legal and non-reproachable way.  

“Yay, Earth,” Shawn agreed weakly, and booked it out of the infirmary just as soon as Carson gave him the all clear.  He’d much rather deal with a pissed-off ex-assassin/current-Army Ranger boyfriend and a mopey and abandoned best friend he’s not allowed to tell the truth to (when for once in his life he actually really, _really_ wants to tell the truth about something) than a fairly recently acquired bigger, older brother who is also his boss and can probably kill him with his pinky, who is also pissed at him.  At least if Eliot kills him, he’d be out love and sexytimes.  If John killed him, he’d be out a manny and an inconvenient reminder of his dad’s philanderous ways.  Therefore Shawn was definitely safer with Eliot.  Sexytimes always trumped mannies.  Except for when they were with the mannies.  Which Eliot’s would be.  So Shawn would be extra super safe with Eliot.

Shawn hurried down the hall to the transporter that would take him to their apartment to pack—the sooner he was back on solid Earth, the better.


	11. In which 'Can I have a pony?' is the most feared question for parents everywhere

JOHN

John stared blankly down at the requisition forms on his desk, toying with the pen in his hand.  They were in another galaxy, and yet the powers that be still had them fill out hardcopy in triplicate when it came to asking for more supplies from Earth.  Bureaucracy was amazing, but that didn’t mean he could put off the paperwork, as much as he wanted to, or they’d never get the necessary Earth-made supplies vital to the continued success of their mission.  John was finding it hard to concentrate on the forms in front of him, though.

Shawn was safely on Earth for the next four days, where he couldn’t cause any trouble (at least, where he couldn’t cause any trouble that _John_ had to deal with), Rodney was awake, and Jesse hadn’t, to John’s knowledge, tried to plug anyone into an Ancient sentient city for at least a day and a half now.  He should really take advantage of the respite while he had it.  If there was one thing his tours in Pegasus had taught John over the years, it was to appreciate the downtime—because it was probably gonna end dramatically, possibly with explosions, in about five minutes or so.  (So he might as well take those five minutes to request more goddamn condoms and peanut butter, or else the Marines were going to start trying to repopulate the Pegasus Galaxy all on their ownsome.  And as much as the natives might love the idea, John had no effing clue how he’d explain that situation to the brass back at the SGC, and didn’t really want to try.  As for the peanut butter, John had learned very early in his military career to ignore the demands of the mess hall at his peril.)

Roughly three minutes ahead of schedule, Rodney burst into John’s hiding place—also known on the official blueprints as his office—disheveled and sweaty and red in the face, a damp t-shirt straining across his shoulders and wearing the ratty sweatpants he usually only used as pajama pants.   John was on his feet without any recollection of getting there, hand on the gun in his holster and rapping out a demand for a SITREP while his brain was still perseverating on the way Rodney’s broad shoulders filled the doorway.  

Rodney had looked so shrunken and narrow in the hospital gurney for those hellish two weeks he was in the coma, so it was good to see him taking up the space around him like he owned it again, even though his sweats were hanging a little looser than usual, and the t-shirt wasn’t as tight as it used to be.   (John ignored the tight clench of relief in his gut at the sight of Rodney upright and abrasive, if looking thinner and weaker than normal.)

Rodney looked confused and flustered at John’s demand for a report.  “What?  Are we under attack?  Why does no one tell me these things?!” Rodney complained, tapping at his ear and looking momentarily baffled when he didn’t encounter a radio, before comprehension flooded his face and he gestured peremptorily for John to hand his over.  John ignored him.

“I thought _you_ were telling me those things,” John replied with a wave at Rodney’s flustered appearance, sinking back down into his chair at the evident lack of immediate impending doom.

“Oh.”  Still looking a little bewildered, Rodney hovered in John’s doorway, oddly silent, at least for Rodney.

“Did you need something?  Shouldn’t you still be plugged into the wall in the infirmary?”  John finally asked, wondering just what exactly the hell was going on.

“Nope.  I’m a free man.  Atlantis gave me the all clear—except for updates and bug fixes, and seriously, how disturbing is that—a couple of hours ago and Carson released me from the infirmary and into the evil clutches of that sadist Pasha,” Rodney said, frowning when he mentioned the physical therapist.  Well, that explained his flushed face and sweaty dishabille.  Pasha was a overbearing tyrant in his domain, for all he was deceptively soft-spoken and smiling outside it.

John rolled his eyes.  “It’s just PT, Rodney, it’s not like he’s actually trying to break you.  I’m sure you’ll live,” he told Rodney dryly, ignoring that stupid clench in his gut that made itself known again when he joked about Rodney’s close call.  It’d go away soon enough with a decent cushion of time between when he’d last seen Rodney in a hospital bed.  If it didn’t, he’d make an appointment with Carson for a physical.  Getting surprised by mutating into a giant alien space bug once was enough, thanks.  Though this felt more like appendicitis had, back when he was in ROTC.  Maybe Pegasus had spontaneously regrown his appendix (in the wrong place) and it was thinking about rupturing (again).  Stranger things had happened, after all (see: mutating into a giant alien space bug).

“So did you make a break for it, or did Pasha actually let you go?”  John asked, not that he was intending on giving Rodney up if he had escaped—John had endured PT with Pasha pretty recently himself, and wouldn’t blame Rodney for playing hooky.

Rodney scowled and grumbled in response to John’s comment, but John tuned out his answer, instead listening to the rising and falling of Rodney’s voice.  He hid a smile with some industrious shuffling of requisition forms—he’d missed Rodney the most when he’d sat by his bed and watched the still, silent form hooked up to the machines, a strange simulacrum that was nothing like the man he knew and-  John stood up once his fond smile was hidden safely away and Rodney’s breathing had evened out from the harsh rasping he’d been trying to hide when he’d first darkened John’s door not two minutes ago.

“You wanna see what the mess can rustle up for an invalid?” John asked.  “I bet as long as you keep quiet they’ll be nice and sympathetic and forget how much you usually irritate them,” he grinned sharply over at Rodney as they left John’s rarely-used office.

Oddly, Rodney didn’t get that pinched and annoyed look John’s teasing generally rewarded him with.  Instead, he smiled absently in John’s direction—an actual smile, and not just the usual wry twist of lips—and pulled one of his ubiquitous touch-pads out of god knew where (maybe it folded?  John couldn’t figure out how it’d fit in Rodney’s sweatpants’ pockets otherwise) and was tapping away at it.  Halfway to the mess hall, he waved it in front of John’s face, too close for him to see it clearly and obscuring his line of sight enough to make him to collide with an innocent Marine.

John grabbed it out of Rodney’s hands to get a better look at the data on the screen, and to prevent any more embarrassing run-ins with other innocent bystanders.  Rodney leaned in, too close, resting a hand distractingly at the small of John’s back to steady himself as he peered over John’s shoulder at the screen, pointing at a string of numbers and symbols as they walked.  John moved away from the hand and the encroachment on his bubble of personal space, but figured it was too much effort to make a fuss when Rodney just crowded back in and put his hand right back in the same spot, too intent on the screen of the data-pad to notice anything not in the realm of knowledge.

“That’s the equation Atlantis gave you?  I want to make sure it made it though that ridiculous game of telephone intact and correct—compare it to that tab she flagged for you in that conversation, will you?”  Figured.  John felt a little like he imagined printouts of the millennium problems might if they, well, felt—only valued for the information they contained with no regard for themselves.  John realized where his train of thought was heading and shook it off with a mental wince, refocusing on Rodney and Atlantis’s very own millennium problem.  Eon problem?  Whatever over ten thousand years worked out to-

“Uh, yeah.  That looks right,” John managed to confirm, still thrown from the combination of Rodney’s ignorance of the concept of personal space and his own thought processes.  John refused to acknowledge his awareness of the ridiculous amount of heat Rodney was putting off as his body worked to cool down from his physical therapy session, radiating through his palm on John’s lower back and across his entire right side where Rodney was pressed up against him to point out something on the data-pad.

“I’m trying to figure out why she gave this to you.  If it’s a formula for the theory of travel between universes, or if it has something to do with the Wraith ships themselves—by the way, we’ve gotta think of a better name for them seeing as they’re not really Wraith ships, especially if Atlantis wants us to embark on some epic quest to free them from slavery or what have you,” Rodney muttered, not really to himself, in one of his half-aware stream-of-consciousness monologues, multitasking as he scrolled through the math on his data-pad without actually taking it back from John, walking down the hall in step with him.

John nudged Rodney into turning into the doorway of the mess hall with a shoulder bump, and Rodney went with a pro-forma squawk of annoyance.  Rodney gasped out a curse John was glad Jesse wasn’t around to hear when he walked straight into Ronon’s back and barely saved the data-pad from tumbling to the floor when the bump jostled it from John’s hands.  Ronon and Major Morris were talking quietly and intently, halfway through the door to the mess hall, turned towards each other in a way that excluded the rest of the world from their conversation.

“Sharing secrets, guys?” John asked with a raised eyebrow and no real expectation or desire for an answer.  The last time he’d actually broken into a conversation between the two of them, he’d ended up in a really fucking confusing discussion that somehow combined base-twelve counting systems and Satedan military history and Steven Segal’s entire filmography in a way that obviously made complete sense to everyone but him.

Ronon grunted and moved out of the way, pulling Major Morris along after him with a big hand wrapped around the Major’s bicep.  Morris waved an absent farewell over his shoulder, not halting as he expounded on, from what John could tell, was a heartfelt ode to the benefits of grenade launchers over assault rifles or pulse guns in a manufactured reality.

Rodney snorted and muttered something under his breath about ‘hand-wavy dream physics’ that John didn’t feel like asking him to elaborate on, and tucked his data-pad safely away back wherever it had come from in the first place (about which John was no more enlightened now than he had been in the first place.  He suspected, however, that Rodney was keeping it tucked in the waistband of his sweats at the small of his back like the geek version of a gangsta with a gun).  “Shall we?” Rodney asked, mockingly waving John ahead of him as they hit the end of the lunch line.  Being in a coma had changed the man.  Being waved ahead in the lunch line was definitely a first from Rodney.

John craned his neck to see what was on offer today: almost-meatloaf and the disturbing yet delicious violet mashed potatoes, along with the ubiquitous gallons of Pegasus’ version of coleslaw.  He reported his findings to Rodney, who clapped his hands together and rubbed them against each other in a disturbingly accurate portrayal of a clichéd B-movie villain.  “Excellent,” he cackled with manic eyes, before dropping the (hopefully) character and grinning at John.  “Something that almost tastes right.  The universe is smiling on me today,” Rodney said lightly, clapping John on the back with a broad, hot hand.

They were sitting down, eating with the silent and focused determination that came from the mess hall producing food that almost tasted like home and was good to boot, when Jesse startled John by appearing at his side (Ronon must have made good on those ‘sneaking’ lessons Jesse had been begging for).  “Hi Uncle ‘Kay!” he chirped, before facing John solemnly, a gravely serious expression on his face.  “‘Lantis says the ship-people the Wraiths slaved grow like puppies,” his son stated baldly.  

John froze with horror, his fork paused in the air in front of his mouth, mashed violet almost-potatoes dropping from it to the table with a resounding splat.

Rodney chortled with what looked like unholy glee.  John pretended not to notice, and said firmly, “No.  Just, no.  You’re grounded, and even if you weren’t, you still wouldn’t get a baby Hive ship for your very own.”  Internally, he despaired.  This was going to be like the pony thing, he could tell already.  Which, they'd lived on the ranch—the kid had needed a horse.  But that didn't bode well for John now.

“‘Lantis says they’re not Hives, they’re Leevie- Leavvy-” Jesse paused, frowning briefly before his expression cleared, the low buzz in the back of John’s mind letting him know Atlantis was correcting his son’s pronunciation (and how fucked up was that?), “ _Leviathans_.  Geez, Daddy.  Also, she wants you to know that she talked to the free ones and they’re coming to visit us.”

John straightened up.  “The _free_ ones?” he asked, his voice not breaking like that of an adolescent going through puberty.  “I thought they were all-” Atlantis interrupted him with a quick summation of her busy last two hours, and John sagged against the table, glad he was still sitting down.  “Two _hundred_?” he shouted in reply to her briefing, even though she didn’t interpret volume the same way the rest of his command did.  Speaking of which, the mess hall quieted significantly, and John lowered his voice when he corrected himself at Atlantis’s iteration of specificity.  “One hundred and seventy six free Leviathans.   _Shit_.”  Meal forgotten, John got to his feet as calmly as he could.  He didn’t want to alarm the mess hall filled with soldiers and scientists poised for action after his earlier shout (Pegasus as a whole seemed to have trained them a little too well over the years when it came to the appearance of alarm in Atlantis’ command staff), and headed for the door and Woolsey’s office, walking as quickly as an approximation of his normal stride could take him.

This was something he needed to let Woolsey in on in private, and not over the Command channel (which both the scientists and scientifically-inclined military personnel hacked into with distressing regularity).

Someone grabbed his hand, and he looked down to see Jesse skipping along beside him, a beatific grin on his mischievous little face.  Rodney was trailing along behind them, almost-meatloaf obviously forgotten, tapping at his data-pad with increasing urgency as they closed in on Woolsey’s office.

Jesse recaptured John’s attention, saying, “The baby ones are real small, daddy.  Smaller than a pony!  And they-” John hung his head in defeat and walked faster.  If it wasn’t one thing these days, it was another.

 


	12. In which people just really need to start talking to each other

SHAWN

Awkward was an understatement, when it came to describing the current situation between himself and Eliot.  He hadn’t seen El on Atlantis until it came time to step through the gate—he’d been worried that Eliot was going to skip their leave altogether and just spend his five days off lurking around the city while Shawn was back on Earth.  But Eliot had mysteriously appeared in the gate room right before the gate had kerwooshed, and had stepped through it with Shawn.  Shawn’s next worry had been that Eliot would disappear while they were on-planet, maybe head off to Boston to catch up with the rest of his Merry Men, or maybe just disappear completely, never to be seen again.  But again, Eliot had surprised him by already being on the C-130 transport that was dropping them off at some Air Force base near Santa Barbara when Shawn clambered through the hatch.  Shawn figured he should stop being surprised when Eliot glared him into the rental car on the base and drove them to the fixer-upper El had bought on the outskirts of town, but it was difficult for him to get a read on the situation, as Eliot had managed to say not a  _single word_  to him the entire time.  Not even a sound or a grunt or a nod; Eliot was taking the silent treatment to a whole new level.  
  
Olympic levels of silence radiated from the driver’s side of the rental car after Eliot parked in the driveway of his house, before he got out, grabbed their bags (both their bags, so that was one question answered, at least) from the trunk and strode up to the porch, pausing only briefly to unlock the door before disappearing inside.  Warily, Shawn unbuckled himself from the seatbelt and got out of the car.  He was almost certain Eliot wasn’t going to murder him horribly and bury his body under the tomato plants in the garden, if only because the tomatoes were rather nitrogen sensitive.  (He might have been being overly melodramatic, but he also really wasn’t looking forward to the confrontation that was obviously in the offing.)  
  
Shawn procrastinated entering the house by taking the time to shoot off a quick text to Gus on the new phone he’d picked up at one of the gas stations they’d stopped at.   _Burton McGrumpyPants!  In town for your b-day, surprise you tomorrow!_   He flipped the phone closed (the thing he’d missed most with his iPhone was the ability to dramatically flip it open and closed) and shoved it back in his pocket without waiting for a reply.  Time to face the music.  Or worse, the angry mime.  Shawn girded his loins, took a deep breath, and forced himself to enter the front door, still hanging ominously open into the dimly lit cavernous maw of the foyer.    
  
He knew Eliot well enough by now to know that he was ‘clearing’ the house, slipping silently from room to room with his gun drawn, a military-man ritual that Shawn likened (if only in his own head, he wasn’t an idiot, after all) to a big cat, like a lion or a panther, re-marking its territory after an extended absence.  So Shawn was understandably startled when he made his way into the kitchen to await his doom and found it already waiting for him.  Obviously he’d procrastinated for a little longer than he’d thought, because there was no universe in which Eliot Spencer would forgo checking his long-abandoned house for intruders.    
  
Eliot had his arms braced on the island counter in the middle of the kitchen, head hanging between his shoulders and his hair hanging forward to obscure his face.  (Shawn felt a brief and inappropriately timed fission of possessive glee at the fact the SGC hadn’t even  _tried_  to tackle El on the whole hair issue.  Damn, he loved El’s hair.)  Shawn must have made some noise as he entered, because Eliot sighed heavily without looking up from whatever was so damned interesting on the counter.  
  
“What have I been doing wrong, Shawn?” was most definitely  _not_  what Shawn had been expecting to hear coming from Eliot’s mouth after the day or so of frigid silence.  
  
“Buh?”  Shawn was caught flat-footed.  
  
Eliot raised his head to stare at Shawn, pushing the hair out of his face with the double-handed scrape that Shawn had learned long ago meant Eliot felt frustrated and impotent (not  _actually_  impotent, Shawn could verify this with empirical knowledge, but like Eliot felt trapped in something he didn’t know how to fix).  “Shawn, you tried to taser me because I hugged you-”  
  
“In public!  Hugged in  _public_ ,” Shawn interrupted to clarify.  
  
Eliot let his hands fall to his sides in defeat.  “Exactly.  It’s not like I’ve ever hidden the fact I’m with you, hell, we’re officially roommates in a one-bedroom apartment.  Even the brass at the SGC know what’s what with us.”  Eliot sighed again, and scrubbed his hands over his face.  “So obviously I’m doing something wrong here, and I need you to tell me what it is, because I haven’t got a fucking clue.”  
  
Shawn eased onto a stool on the opposite side of the island from Eliot.  Ok, so.  So not how he thought the talk was going to go.  “Ok, so.  So not how I thought this talk was going to go,” he repeated himself aloud, confused as  _meelgarth_  in mating season, as Teyla would say.  
  
Eliot propped his elbows on the counter and met Shawn’s eyes.  “Which is my point.  Shawn, you not only thought I was an evil clone, you thought I was breaking up with you.  Seriously, man.  That’s like, the furthest thing from my mind—I mean, sure I’ve wanted to strangle you a couple of times, or a couple hundred times, but I’ve never wanted to break up with you.”  
  
“Uh, um.”  Shawn eyed Eliot warily.  “I’m not quite sure how to take that.  But, um.  I love you too?”  The middle of a fight—or a relationship ‘talk’—or whatever this was—was not the time Shawn had been planning on dropping the L-bomb, especially as poorly chosen humor to defuse the situation.  He regretted it as soon as he said it.  Mostly because he did, and had for a while, and there was no way Eliot was going to believe him about it now.  
  
Eliot blinked once, hard, before meeting Shawn’s gaze steadily again.  “I know.  Me too.”  Again, Eliot caught him by surprise.  This conversation was veering so far away from the route Shawn had thought it was going to take that it was about to end up in Cleveland.  “But if we never talk about this shit-”  
  
“Because you’re never there to talk to!” Shawn’s outburst caught them both by surprise.  If he could look at himself with the same level of consternation Eliot was, he’d be doing it.  But hey, he’d started the ball rolling and since he couldn’t take it back, “I don’t want to be the clingy girlfriend who makes you choose, but El, I haven’t said more than ‘hi’ ‘good morning’ and ‘night’ to you for twelve days straight.  Literally.  You don’t do more than give me the up-nod when I pass you in the hall or wave at you in the cafeteria- Oh my god, I’m back in high school,” Shawn interrupted himself to wail.  
  
“Jesus, Shawn,” Eliot was around the island like a shot, behind Shawn and wrapping Shawn up in arms that were like bands of steel, and about as likely to release Shawn despite his efforts to get free.  “Shit.  Baby,” the term of endearment, never before heard outside happy-sexy-times, froze Shawn in place, “you’re always talking to someone, and smiling, and I don’t want to interrupt.  You always used to grab me, or hell, sit on me, when you wanted my attention.  Since we got to Atlantis—since we got to the Mountain, come to think of it—you stopped and I thought you were too busy for- I was giving you your space so you wouldn’t get sick of me.”  Eliot squeezed his steel-band-arms tighter around Shawn in a rib-creaking hug before letting him go and backing off a step, pushing his hair out of his face with a bashful hand and not meeting Shawn’s incredulous eyes when Shawn spun around on the stool to face him.  
  
“I stopped because I didn’t want you to get  _gay-bashed_  by some meat-head homophobe in a training exercise!” Shawn did not screech shrilly.  He stated it calmly, in a deep manly voice, with an overtone of polite incredulity.  
  
“Baby,” Eliot huffed out a bemused half-laugh (and there was that endearment again.  Shawn didn’t know what the hell was going on, anymore), “over a quarter of the SGC is gay, and almost half the personnel in Atlantis are.  The SGC learned damned fast to weed out the bigots in the beginning, after a couple of fuckups offworld—if someone can’t accept something in their own culture, they’re probably not going to be too friendly to the natives offworld.  I know you read those reports too.”  
  
“I really don’t think I did,” Shawn replied slowly.  “But never mind that.  Are you telling me that you were afraid I was going to break up with you?”  
  
Eliot suddenly stopped meeting his eyes.  “That’s not what I said.”  
  
Shawn’s eyebrows slowly floated up his forehead of their own volition.  “I thought you were breaking up with me, and you were afraid I was going to break up with you, but really we both just had our heads up our asses and are actually desperately and apparently teenagedly in love with each other—that’s what you’re telling me?”  
  
“That’s not-” Eliot broke off, then sighed.  “Apparently.”  
  
“Well, hell, we might as well cap it off with an unplanned and regrettable Vegas-marriage while we’re at it.”  Shawn laughed weakly.  
  
“Ok,” Eliot said simply, meeting Shawn’s eyes from suddenly much closer than the few feet away he’d been a second ago.  “Not the regrettable part, but yeah.”  
  
“Um, what?” Shawn asked hoarsely.  “Are you- Did you- We-”  He’d been joking, hadn’t he?  
  
Eliot cut off Shawn’s broken babbling with a swift kiss.  “You heard me, baby.  Let’s get married.  I’ll prove to you I’m never gonna leave you.  Not ever, not unless you make me.  Till death do us part.”  
  
Shawn wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought he might have just gotten engaged.

 

JOHN

No matter what Atlantis and her personnel were dealing with, even if it was an inbound fleet of independent and intelligent flying spaceship creatures, the regularly scheduled shipments of groceries and fresh meat arrived like clockwork (providing, of course, Earth wasn’t in the middle of yet another secret battle for her immediate and continued existence—those sometimes delayed the  _Daedalus_ or the  _Orion_  by a day or two), and the new crop of problems they brought with them, couldn’t be set aside for a time when things were a little less hectic.  
  
John was on the way from the armory to the kitchens, having discovered two crates of potatoes labeled as ammunition while supervising the Marines inventorying the new goodies, and was hoping the kitchens had some mislabeled bullets for him.  Otherwise, they might have to try lobbing potatoes at the next Wraith they came across and hope the damned catfish had some sort of horribly debilitating and previously undiscovered allergy to root vegetables.  
  
After spending a few hours sorting through the crates with the kitchen staff, he discovered three crates of onions labeled as potatoes, two crates of antibiotics labeled as onions, and one crate of ammunition labeled as kiwis.  John resigned himself to hitting the infirmary next in search of his errant crate of ammunition (thankfully the mislabeled kiwi crate had held bullets rather than grenades, or things might have gotten messy).  He could hear Lorne giving the newly arrived military personnel the ‘Welcome to Atlantis: Here’s How Not to Die’ spiel in the mess hall—he must have started while John was in the walk in freezer, checking the crates of frozen hamburger patties for his missing ammunition—so he slipped out as unobtrusively as possible, not wanting to be pressed into service as a higher-ranking officer.  It was probably (definitely) because Lorne didn’t see him that John got to hear the obviously well-rehearsed end to Lorne’s spiel.  
  
“But above all, you need to remember the Three Rules of Atlantis,” Lorne was projecting well enough that John could hear him clearly, even from across the mess and around the corner.  John slowed, curious as to what his second in command’s Three Rules of Atlantis were; this was the first he’d ever heard of them.  
  
“The First Rule of Atlantis is  _don’t talk or ask about Chaya, I don’t care who brings it up,_ ” Lorne’s voice vibrated with intensity.  John froze.  “The Second Rule of Atlantis is  _don’t talk or ask about Doranda, I don’t care who brings it up._ ” John’s eyes widened.  “The Third Rule of Atlantis is  _don’t let anyone try to make Colonel Sheppard talk about his ‘feelings,’ I don’t care how important they are on their planet._ ”  John choked.  It was like very abbreviated How To Keep John and Rodney Happy manual.  He… really didn’t know what to do with that.  “UNDERSTOOD?” Lorne’s voice rang out, echoing off the bare mess hall walls, the answering “OO-RAH” resounding even louder.


	13. In which uninvited guests make vacation complicated

 SHAWN

They'd been in Santa Barbara for about a day before either of them left the bed for more than a quick trip to the kitchen or bathroom. Makeup sex had been followed quickly by engagement sex, passing out, and morning sex. So it wasn't until the next day that Shawn remembered he'd told Gus he was in town, and by then El's Merry Men had also figured out they were back from parts unknown.

Shawn discovered this when he stumbled downstairs after he woke up, and found Parker perched on top of the kitchen island, grinning at him through a mouthful of cereal.

"Gaaah!" Shawn shrieked, too decaffeinated and exhausted to pretend to himself it was anything other than a high-pitched and emasculating. There was a thud from the bedroom upstairs and suddenly El was shoving Shawn behind him—before sighing like the world was against him.

El shoved his hair out of his face and glared at Parker half-heartedly. "When are the rest of them getting here?" he asked mildly. He patted Shawn on the shoulder absentmindedly, and headed for the fridge, presumably to look for ingredients for the almost-better-than-sex omelettes he'd promised Shawn last night, sometime between rounds two and three.

Shawn tried to slow his racing heart, and had almost succeeded when Parker tossed something at him. He fumbled the catch, and almost dropped it before realizing that it was his SGC-issued burn phone assigned to him for his leave. He didn’t even want to know why Parker had had it, and wasn’t going to ask. Plausible deniability, it was a thing that was real.

Shawn flipped the phone open, eavesdropping on El and Parker's conversation with half an ear as he scrolled through his missed calls and texts. Two calls from Henry, five from his mother, the rest of the Merry Men were going to be here by noon, 18 texts from Gus—wait.

"Here?!" Shawn squeaked. "Aren't they all in Boston, robbing the rich and feeding the poor?"

Parker eyed him curiously, like he was an interesting bug she wanted to put in a jar and keep forever. Shawn took a step back automatically, and resisted the urge to cover himself. Breakfast in boxers was suddenly a hell of a lot less comfortable, what with Parker in the mix when it should have been a delicious batter of just El and Shawn. Mmm, man-pancakes. Also, pancakes suddenly sounded really good. Maybe he could convince El to make those tomorrow.

Parker pulled his attention back to the present awkwardness and away from daydreams of delicious breakfast foods. "We moved to Portland last year, and of course we're robbing rich people." She turned to El, "we don't feed poor people now that you're not volunteering at soup kitchens anymore," she said thoughtfully, ignoring El's irritated and embarrassed head duck. Shawn suppressed a rush of preteen-girl-levels of squee, and tucked the information away for later. "Are we supposed to? I'll remind Nate," she told the ceiling, before pinning Shawn with her creepy stare again. "They're coming because Sophie wants to plan Eliot's wedding, she told him that when we met you, and she said she's not letting falling off the face of the planet stop her." She grinned. Shawn stared.

"Wait, what—how does she even-" Shawn's flabbergasted question was overridden by El's irritated bellow.

"Hardison!"

Shawn's phone rang in his hand. Startled, and still decaffeinated, he jumped and managed to chuck the thing at the ceiling. Shawn needed coffee like, yesterday, especially with the morning being so... not easy. He was gonna get on that, as soon as there was coffee. Or... coffee. El caught Shawn’s cell before it hit the counter and shattered into a million “That’ll be deducted from your paycheck” pieces. He flipped it open without even looking at the Caller ID and growled into it, "Monitoring my security system while I'm gone is not the same fucking thing as bugging my fucking house, man." There was silence for a couple of seconds, and then El added, “Yeah, and if I hear anything about a fucking sex tape, your nuts are history.”

Someone knocked at the door, and Shawn gratefully took the out. Anything to give him an excuse to get out from under Parker's proprietary stare, especially since the growl in El’s voice, combined with the subject matter and the past 12 hours was going to lead to at least one inappropriate boner in the kitchen pretty fucking soon. Shawn changed his mind about the clothes though when the knocking suddenly grew frantic as he passed the front door on his way to the stairs. It sounded urgent, and he was mostly decent.

He pulled open the door and grinned epic frown facing him. "Gussy!" Shawn greeted Gus with open arms. Gus ignored Shawn’s huggy arms and reached past him to grab the door. He swung the door shut again, still on the wrong side of the inside of the house.

"What is the pants rule, Shawn?" Gus shouted through the door.

"I'm inside! It's morning! It's a personal residence with enthusiastic permission of the owner! I'm allowed!" Shawn shouted back.

"Go put on pants, Shawn," Gus replied, sounding weary. Shawn peeked through the fancy peephole El had put in that didn't let people know you were looking through it for very paranoid but disturbingly logical reasons, and sure enough, Grumpypants McGee was pulling on the doorknob so Shawn couldn't re-open the door. "I'm going, I'm going," he told the door. If Parker hadn’t been in the kitchen, he would have made more of an effort, but considering how things were going at the moment, Shawn wanted pants on as of like an hour ago. Also at least one shirt, maybe more.

Two minutes later he'd thrown on some wrinkled clothes from his duffle, thrust a pair of jeans at El on his way through the kitchen (but just jeans, because even Gus's overdeveloped sense of propriety wasn't enough to get him to stop staring at that chest), exited through the side door into the garden, and was sneaking around the house to jump out at Gus, who was still holding the front door shut.

Shawn had learned to be even quieter on his feet since he'd last seen Gus, dodging the scientists in Atlantis, and the shrill yelp Gus let out when Shawn tackled him with a bear hug was glorious.

"Happy geezerhood!" Shawn yelled into Gus's ear before he let Gus shove him off.

"I don't even know why we're friends," Gus muttered, brushing at his lavender Oxford, like Shawn had rolled in the dirt on his way around the house. Which he hadn’t. Much.

"Because I give awesome presents," Shawn told him solemnly, suddenly distracted because he'd just remembered there was a crazy woman in the kitchen talking about weddings. It took a split second for Shawn to decide against breaking it to his bestie gently.

"Also, remember El- uh, Chap- er, Spence?" Dammed aliases. Keeping them straight—well, in order—was a fucking chore.

"Yes, I remember Eliot," Gus agreed dryly. "I did come to his house to find you, after all."

Shawn flailed, dismissing his condescension. "Whatever." He took Gus's hands in his melodramatically, and busted out the new and improved puppy dog eyes (Jesse had given him some pointers). "I forgive you for not having me as your best man at your first wedding, but only if you'll be mine," he announced dramatically.

Gus stated blankly at him. "Is that my present?"

"No, your present's inside, don't be a silly Gus," Shawn rolled his eyes.

Gus's eyes suddenly looked like they were about to pop out of his head, and he yanked his hands out of Shawn’s to clap them over his mouth. "Eliot proposed?" he asked from behind them, the squeal muffled but still understandable.

"No, I did," Shawn said, disgruntled.

"You asked if I wanted a regrettable Vegas shotgun wedding," El's voice came behind them, his amusement audible, "I think I still win, even if I asked second." Shawn and Gus whirled to face the now-open front door, where El leaned in the doorway all shirtless and barefoot and delicious, jeans zipped but not buttoned—but at least, in respect for Gus's tender sensibilities, on.

Shawn drooled. Gus rolled his eyes and sighed, "Of course he did."

 

 

Gus loved his ceremonial bowl and ritual dagger set, and the Athosian-commissioned carved chest that held them, even though Shawn had had to tell him they’d come from a small tribe located somewhere in northern Africa, which was where everyone thought he and Eliot had been assigned after up and joining the Peace Corps on a whim. (The SGC's cover stories were airtight, if boring and unbelievable.) Gus also loved Parker, which was to be expected since she was like an amalgamation of Shawn and Jules, except crazier. What wasn't expected, though, was that Gus was _in love_ with Jules, and had been dating her for a month and a half, now, which was the reason behind Gus's frantic pounding on the door that morning.

Gus had thought Shawn would be upset since he might still be pining for Jules, and had wanted Shawn to hear it from him first, just in case there needed to be punching to restore their friendship.

"What? No!" Shawn exclaimed over El's growl when Gus explained it in almost exactly those words. "No, man, I swear, that's great!" Shawn beamed at Gus, and the funny thing was, he meant it. He honestly, truly, couldn't even remember if there had ever been a reason beyond Jules’ air of unattainability behind his chasing after her. He'd definitely never felt about her the way he felt about a certain Eliot Spencer. The way Gus was obviously worried that Shawn had been pining after her, that he'd taken El as a second choice and had run away to Africa to escape the pain—well, it was more than a few minutes until Shawn could stop laughing.

Gus changed the subject, obviously simultaneously annoyed and relieved, and annoyed about being relieved because it meant he couldn’t have a slap-fight in Jules’ honor. "So, I don't know if you know, but the Supreme Court voted against Prop 8 while you were away, so marriage is legal here again. Are you going to do it while you're here, so your family can come?"

"No, Big Brother can't take time off right now, but we'll probably do it here, yeah," Shawn’s mouth said before his brain could tell it to shut the fuck up. Shawn clapped his hands over his mouth, giving El a wide-eyed, pleading look, even though he knew there was nothing that could stuff that hissing, spitting cat back in the bag.

El groaned, and thumped his head down on the kitchen table, where the four of them had been having El's god omelettes (yes, made of gods, for gods) for breakfast. "Yes, the kitchen's still bugged," El told the table.

Shawn gave it five minutes before Hardison called because he couldn't find anything, and half a day before McKay called to ream him out, restricted as he was by the daily dial-in to the SGC. McKay had bugged Hardison's systems before they left Earth; McKay said it was for safety, but Shawn was pretty sure it had been an ego thing.

Gus eyed them both warily. "I meant Henry and your mom, but ok."

Shawn's head joined El's on the table. "Oh, fuck, I forgot about that," he told the table.

"This is going to be a clusterfuck," El agreed.

Shawn wondered if he could get away with tricking them all into attending the wedding without them ever knowing it was a wedding, and if Hardison would believe Shawn was talking about some distant relative who worked for Homeland Security or the FBI or something.

“We should go cake tasting,” Parker said, contemplatively. Shawn rolled his head to look at her. She was staring up at the ceiling again, which was beginning to make him paranoid. Was that where Hardison’s bugs were? “I like cake,” she smiled at the ceiling.

Shawn closed his eyes and tried to wake up, because maybe this was all a dream. That would be awesome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Going by way I seem to have lost track of my own timeline: There will eventually be a vignette to explain how more time passed in Pegasus than in the Milky Way, and either no one noticed or no one felt the need to share (at least John got two bonus weeks of Shawnless Atlantis out of it). There was a Window of Opportunity situation that Radek took care of relatively quickly, considering he had the SGC's mission reports as a reference. (Or I'll go through and fix the timelines after this is finished, but honestly, the other one sounds more fun.)


	14. In Which Ravening Hordes of Diplomats Descend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tau'ri diplomats invade Atlantis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heeyyyyy... It's kinda been forever, but PurrfectPitch's comment popped up in my inbox right after I made a writing pact with my old college roommate; it was obviously a confluence of events designed by the universe to get me back into Pegasus, yes? It's been a while since then, yes, but I had to wade through the prior 100k words in the 'verse to make sure I knew what was going on in the 'verse so I didn't accidentally retcon more than I already have :)
> 
> Some of you might remember some of this chapter. I'm following through on a promise (or threat) I made about a month ago.

JOHN

The day the Spencer boys stepped through the wormhole to Earth for their five-day leave, John breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe things would quiet down a little now. The Leviathan were still light years away, and wouldn’t be here for at least another week, at Rodney’s best guess. Things were looking quiet in the Pegasus galaxy. It was probably the calm before the storm, but John would take it while it lasted.

And it didn’t last very long. Two days after the Spencer boys had gated back to Earth for their five-day leave, John walked into the ‘Gate room to find Rodney screaming through the ‘Gate about NDAs.

When he finally noticed John, Rodney whirled around to face him, face red and hands gesticulating wildly. "Your idiot brother told his idiot fiancee's idiot friends that he had a brother. Also, he's getting married."

"To Eliot?" John asked, unsurprised. It wasn’t something he’d been expecting, per se, but it was hardly surprising.

"No, to Snookie,” Rodney rolled his eyes. “Of course to his boyfriend, who else?"

"Do you think we can get leave?" John leaned against the console Rodney was flailing behind.

"Considering I'm now half alien ship and you're the commander of the base, probably not." Rodney sounded exasperated, and also exhausted. The bags under his eyes had bags. John wondered if Rodney had realized yet that sleep was a thing even half-alien-ship CSOs needed. Probably not.

John settled in to watch Rodney rant about idiots whose lips needed to be stapled shut so they wouldn’t accidentally let something slip about top-secret government programs to the criminal underbelly of the American west coast. Best entertainment on Atlantis.

The connection from Earth that day was the normal, every-other-day exchange of information between the two galaxies. The Spencer boys moved fast, but then, they always did. They’d only been gone for two days and they were getting married. Maybe by the end of their leave they’ll have adopted a kid.

And as much as Jesse would love having a cousin, especially one on Atlantis (considering John couldn’t seem to remember if he’d ever told Jesse about Dave’s kids. Or Dave, for that matter), John hoped that wasn’t in the stars for this trip. The thought of three Spencer boys to keep track of was terrifying.

A request for a video conference from the SGC distracted John his mental wanderings, and Rodney from his ravings. John waved the ‘Gate tech permission to initiate, looking forward to hearing O’Neill’s input on the situation. O’Neill sometimes wanted to shoot the shit with John when the wormhole was open, and he could use the General’s opinion on this NDA-violation thing Rodney was talking about. He really didn’t want to conscript Eliot’s team of misfits to Atlantis—he’d have to see them all the time, and he didn’t want that to happen. Plus, that Nate guy would drink Atlantis dry in less than a day, and John didn’t want to deal with the mutiny an accidentally alcohol-free foreign posting would inspire. Soldiers had to go into the dry bases with adequate forewarning and mental preparation (and knowledge of the local watering holes), or things sometimes got messy.

The officer on the other end of the wormhole wasn’t O’Neill, however, which raised John’s hackles. O’Neill always managed to be the one delivering good news, so if it wasn’t him, well, it wasn’t a good sign.

The officer was quick to assure Atlantis that there was no emergency, but his next few words still made John break out into a cold sweat, even as the standard data packets kept transmitting benignly back and forth through the wormhole like it was a standard communication and not the premonition of complete horror that it actually was.

“Some select and highly influential world leaders and their aides will shortly embark through the wormhole to visit Atlantis,” the officer began calmly, staring into the camera and sending a shiver down John’s spine. Diplomats. “Please send the usual confirmation that the Iris is lowered. Your technicians should already have the list-” Chuck was magically beside John, shoving a data pad into his hand and indicating the list of August Personages deigning to grace Atlantis with their presence, “-of the dignitaries. Their inspection of Atlantis is crucial to a decision being debated in the White House and the U.N., so please show them every courtesy and be on your best behavior. Expect dignitaries to begin arrival in approximately seven minutes. The decision was quickly made, without an in-depth briefing, so expect to deal with the contingent shock and awe.” John grimaced.

“Better them than us, though,” someone not the officer who’d been speaking previously muttered just out of range of the camera from the other end of the wormhole—a someone who sounded suspiciously like General O’Neill—before the officer resumed speaking.

“Packet transmission to continue as usual until the wormhole expires. SGC out.” The screen flickered and the image cut out. John scrolled through the names on the list Chuck had handed him, frowning fiercely at it as if the innocent data pad was the one he could blame for all this. Great. Foreign dignitaries from Earth to invade Atlantis in order to stare and criticize, just so they could make an informed decision regarding something John didn’t have the clearance to know.

He hated this need-to-know shit when he was on the wrong side of it. Because of course no one ever took into account that whatever decision was being made was almost definitely going to directly affect his command, and maybe go as far as to determine whether he would even have a command after this diplomatic fracas.

He’d have to keep Jesse out of sight, too, since he didn’t know how O’Neill had played the stowaway angle on his end. The kid wasn’t going to be too happy with that—Jesse loved new people and hated being confined to quarters. John just hoped he wouldn’t be stuck with cold showers for a week because of it. (Jesse’s revenges tended to be suspiciously similar to the ones Rodney favored. John really hoped Jesse hadn’t found some encrypted file somewhere on the servers with lovingly detailed step-by-step instructions on ‘How To Make The Bastards Pay’.)

A title popped out at him from the list of dignitaries. John glanced around the command center until he spotted Major Morris and waved him over. “I’ll need you to escort the British Prime Minister and his entourage while they‘re here, Major,” John ordered absentmindedly, still scrolling through the other names and titles on the list.

Morris surprised him by snorting with something that wasn’t remotely close to humor. “Not bloody likely, sir. You should keep me away from the prat unless you’re looking to start up an international incident for some reason,” Morris’s words verged on (and completely surpassed) insubordinate, but his tone was respectful—if dry as dust. He also sounded completely serious.

John fixed him with a gimlet eye, but sadly Morris didn’t fidget under his stare. (That look didn’t work on Jesse anymore, if it ever had, either—he’d have to start practicing in the mirror or something soon.)

Knowing how little he actually knew about his foreign-born Marine, considering he’d never actually cracked the man’s file—something he probably should have done before designating him his third in command, even if he had been the incumbent in the position—John proceeded with caution. (He also resolved to take a look at Morris’s file in his next free moment. Though who knew when the hell he‘d manage to have a free moment, considering this was Pegasus.) “Something I should know, Major?” John quirked an eyebrow at him, a la Spock (which not something he’d ever admit to having practiced in the mirror for hours on end as a teenager).

“Probably,” Morris replied shortly.

“Something you’re gonna tell me?” John prodded after a few moments, the bustle in the gate room below them only serving to emphasize their cone of silence.

“Doubtful,” Morris’s fine-boned face managed to make a sneer look elegant, somehow, until the Major seemed to remember that he was addressing his commanding officer and tacked on an apologetic “Sir,” the sneer wiped away by an expression of mild chagrin.

Morris was quiet for a brief moment before he added ruefully, “Maybe someday, sir, but it’s…” he trailed off. “Sorry, sir, but-” he gestured expansively at the city around them, “It’s as big as she is, and as important—and as secret. I really can’t say.” Well, John thought, at least the Major’s abortive fits and starts of exposition seemed to make sense to one of them. It would have been nice if that explanation had made sense to John, though.

But Morris sounded frighteningly close to distraught, so John briefly weighed the little he knew of him against this potentially dangerous, potentially compromising, potentially just ragingly paranoid big fat secret.

John’s gut was telling him to trust the kid, and his brain was aching from all the diplomatic doublespeak it’d already been subjected to (and he knew there was more—a lot more—to come; the diplomats hadn’t even crossed the event horizon yet), so he let it go. For now.

He waved Morris off and leaned into the railing overlooking the gate room to take some of the weight off his leg while he awaited the impending horde of diplomats. Even though it'd been almost a month since he'd gotten out of the infirmary, it still twinged sometimes. He probably should’ve finished his physical therapy with Pasha rather than abusing the command structure and getting himself out of it as soon as he’d regained mobility, as much as John hated to admit it.

Morris quickly disappeared—probably to the other end of the city, just in case John changed his mind—and John hovered in the gate room uneasily, waiting for Earth’s world leaders to traipse through the Stargate and thoroughly ruin his morning. (It was only 0700. This was obviously going to be a very long, very crappy day.)

John resolved to deal with Morris’s issues as soon as the Powers That Compelled John’s Unquestioning Obedience had grown tired of their little field trip—without, hopefully, destroying his city.

***

The majority of John’s morning was spent escorting the VIPs around Atlantis singlehandedly. He’d shooed Rodney off as soon as the dignitaries had gotten a glimpse of him, assuring them that the CSO had very important work to be doing to ensure the dignitaries’ safety while on Atlantis.

Truthfully, he didn’t want to risk one of the VIPs taking exception to Rodney’s brand of offensive honesty and take it out on Atlantis. The visiting VIPs included the President of the United States (and her cadre of secret service bodyguards), Britain’s painfully young Prime Minister (and his painfully-young entourage), someone who might have been the Dali Lama (the one person without a flock of other people following him around), and a few other Very Important People—plus minions—that he couldn’t place right away, despite having been formally introduced to all of them and having skimmed their dossiers in the five minutes leeway he’d had before they started stumbling through the wormhole from Earth, bright-eyed and awestruck.

John explained the SGC program and Atlantis and the Pegasus galaxy as he led them up hallways, down the piers, over to the Armory and the Jumper bay and up to the labs, hobbling along and gritting his teeth against the throbbing in his right thigh that was slowly getting worse as the day went on. He hadn’t walked this much since he’d escaped Pasha’s tender mercies, and it was becoming increasingly clear to him that declaring himself done with physical therapy before the physical therapist had agreed to let him go might have actually been a giant mistake.

The point was reinforced throughout the morning as his herd of desk-bound dignitaries and their entourages had to constantly check their speed so as to not overtake him.

At least Woolsey would be in charge of them after lunch, and John could hobble down to the infirmary and let Carson push some painkillers on him so he could get through the rest of the day without collapsing.

John hadn’t seen Lorne all day—he assumed his second in command was doing the real work today and making sure the Marines didn’t slack off or manage to sink one of the piers again (the less said about that particular incident, the better). Morris, of course, had vanished from the control room quicker than seemed humanly possible before the first dignitary had even stepped through the event horizon, and if the Major wasn’t also doing some real work John would make sure he’d be sorry about it later. If he had to suffer, so did his second and third in command.

Especially since his second and third in command had abandoned him without remorse to the torture of herding bureaucrats. But John would have his revenge. He spent the time the dignitaries spent ooh-ing and aah-ing over Atlantis’ infrastructure plotting his revenge, in hopes of distracting himself from the pain in his leg and the accompanying torment of trying to impress Atlantis’ importance to the Pegasus galaxy upon the bean counters of the United Nations. He spent a few minutes while they were touring the hydroponics labs wondering if maybe Botany needed two grunts digging holes or turning the herbivore manure they’d traded for from the Athosians (that had been the high point of the trade talks that day—the look on Teyla’s face!) into compost. He could only hope.

Their tour of the armory inspired him to contemplate the necessity of a very thorough inventory of it, one that required his two disgraced minions to count every single bullet in every single magazine. Twice. Each.

The President distracted him from his musings with yet another question about Atlantis’s weapons capability, and he tried to answer her as well as possible while simultaneously implying that Atlantis and her weapons were much more valuable and effective in Pegasus than they would be in any other galaxy. These were the times he missed Elizabeth the most—Lord knew he was no diplomat. If he’d had advanced warning, he could’ve sent a Jumper to bring Teyla back from the Athosian camp on the mainland (where most of the Athosians had moved after the Wraith attack on New New New Athos a little over a month ago) in time to meet them and give him a hand with the diplomatic doublespeak Teyla and his current charges all seemed to speak fluently. It probably would have also helped establish in the VIPs’ minds that she was their equal, as she was the leader of her people, and he was sure she would’ve also managed to do or say something unexpected, innovative, and brilliant in order to get them to respect her like they should—she always did. She was headed back to the city now anyway, and would meet them in the mess hall for what it was looking like was going to end up as a State dinner. If you could have State dinners at lunchtime.

***

John surreptitiously watched Morris fidget uneasily at his end of the hastily-constructed banquet table in the mess hall. He’d been seated across from one of the Prime Minister’s entourage (a tall, slim, swarthy guy, whose job so far seemed to be just looking elegant and slightly disdainful of everything. John was pretty sure he’d heard the other aide call him Blaze, which detracted a little from his elegance and dignity). From the looks of it, Morris was of more than half of a mind to flee.

They were far enough away from John and the rest of the ‘important’ visitors that he couldn’t catch most of what they were saying down at Morris’s end of the table, though a lull in John’s neighbors’ conversation allowed the tall aide’s “Do a runner, did you?” reach his ears, though not Morris’s response. Which was probably a good thing, judging from the look on Morris’s face. Apparently, Morris knew the Prime Minister’s entire cabinet, seeing as how he’d had an intense, if silent, stand-off with the Prime Minister’s other aide (a very efficient woman whose constant note-taking frankly terrified John) right before they’d all sat down to eat. John made a mental note to definitely look into Morris’s file sometime soon. He was sure it would make for some fairly interesting reading.

John stopped watching discreetly and turned to blatantly stare as Morris pushed away from the table and stood to leave, even though the ridiculously formal meal had barely even begun. (Everyone was in their best, the civilians in formal wear John hadn‘t known they‘d brought through the wormhole and the military presenting a united front in dress blues, pushing the ridiculousness even further; all the chest candy in the galaxy wasn’t gonna help if the Wraith launched a surprise attack. John longed for his BDUs even as he acknowledged the array of glittering medals on his own and his officers’ chests had obviously changed the diplomats’ impressions of them for the better.)

Morris stalked out of the mess hall. The aide who’d been talking to him leaned back in his chair looking smug and superior, if slightly nonplussed, by the Major‘s reaction. John pushed back his own chair, preparing to follow his officer and find out what the hell had crawled up his ass and order him back to the table and to suck it up and act like a grown up, because if John had to suffer, Morris damn well had to too.

When John went to stand, however, his leg twinged and he had to grab the table abruptly to stay on his feet. He couldn’t suppress his wince, one not caused by the pain in his leg, as the Prime Minister seemed to suddenly notice the melodrama his minion had instigated.

“I’ll sort it out, if you don’t mind, Colonel,” the Prime Minister smiled genially across the table at him, already rising from his seat, and had headed off after Morris before John had a chance to argue. John very much minded the implication he wasn’t able to handle his officer. Not to mention the fact there was no way he was going to let Morris speak to the Minister in private, not after Morris’s comment earlier in the day. And then there was the fact that like hell was he going to let a civvie wander through Atlantis unescorted. He’d probably press a button and accidentally ascend everyone.

John trailed the Prime Minister out of the mess hall, though he began to reconsider when his leg started feeling like it was going to threaten to give out before he was halfway across the mess hall. There was no way he was turning back now, though. Enough of the dignitaries were watching the drama already, and he didn’t particularly feel like getting the attention of the rest of them by turning around halfway across the room. The more low-profile he could keep this incident, the better.

If he walked carefully enough and remembered not to limp, it didn’t look as bad as it felt, even if putting his full weight on the leg hurt like a bitch. He just hoped he wasn’t managing to push his recovery back with this idiocy. He resolved to go grovel to Pasha as soon as this was all over, because his leg was obviously nowhere near ready for normal use, no matter how much he’d like it to be.

The Prime Minister was so far ahead of him that John couldn’t even see him by the time John finally reached the hallway. Damn his stupid leg; he wasn’t moving much faster than a slow crawl now. He braced a hand on Atlantis’ wall now that there was no one to see, and was able to pick up his pace a little with the third point of added stability. John glanced down each branching corridor as he made his way slowly down the hall away from the banquet, but he didn’t see the Prime Minister or his wayward officer down any of them. Nearing the end of the hallway and the penultimate branching, the sound of voices drifted into earshot. John cursed the Ancients and their pointlessly, stupidly long corridors as he followed the sound of their voices and turned down the hallway leading to the left. The Ancients had invented transporters, so why the hell had they felt the need for hallways leading nowhere?

“Oi, Malfoy! So this is where you scarpered off to. Had to run to another galaxy to hide from the shame of having the Dark Mark, then?” the Prime Minister’s voice echoed down the halls, and John quickened his pace. He suddenly understood his predecessor’s need for a translator—the accent was one thing, but John had no fucking clue what a malfoy was, or whatever the fuck a dark mark was. Hopefully they weren’t insults, though the Prime Minister‘s tone made the hope feel fairly futile.

“Piss off, Golden Boy,” Morris bit back. John figured that didn’t bode well for a pleasant conversation, and just hoped his damned leg would get him there before the gloves came off and fists were thrown.

“Oh, come now, Ferret. Golden Man by now I’d think, ta ever so.” Yeah, the Prime Minister wasn’t sounding very friendly. John ignored the twinges from his leg and broke into a slow jog. Damned Ancients and their damned love of long, clean lines in architecture. He was pretty sure there was no practical reason for this hallway to even exist, other than to make life difficult for him.

“You’d think another bleeding galaxy would be far enough away to never have to look at your scarred head again.” John hadn’t noticed any scars on the Prime Minister. Maybe he’d had reconstructive surgery? “I broke your nose once—are you looking for a repeat?” Morris’s voice was vicious. At least the Major was in his Class A’s and therefore unarmed. John was starting to think the comment about an international incident hadn’t been the exaggeration he’d assumed it was. Another assumption he’d made that was now very obviously wrong was that Morris’s beef with the new Prime Minister was based on political differences—they obviously knew each other, just like Morris had known the Prime Minister's aides. Did Morris know everyone in the British government?

“As if you could, when I’m not in a body-bind. Seriously though, Malfoy. It’s done and sorted. School’s over, the war’s won; why not be civil? I mean, you chose the right side in the end, even if took Snake-face threatening your family to get you to turn your coat.” The Minister’s tone was like honey over a razor blade—John was pretty certain that the Prime Minister was hoping it was going to devolve into a fist fight. Because, honestly, anyone who knew Morris knew that impugning his loyalty was only going to get him riled up, and since they certainly seemed to know each other... well. Morris wouldn’t have started it, but Atlantis would get the blame, which might be what the Prime Minister was aiming for.

“You always were a bit slow, were you not? The side I chose was my own. It always had been.” Morris’s voice was smooth and chilly, and his statement was imbued with a strange sort of finality. John breathed a sigh of relief when the Major stalked around the corner towards John. Morris had an impressive control over his quick temper, when he chose to exercise it. Luckily for Atlantis, and John‘s nerves, Morris had done so rather than trying to strangle the Prime Minister with his bare hands.

Morris saluted as soon as he noticed John. John returned it sloppily, making a split second decision not to bust the Major for stalking out of a State dinner in the throes of a hissy fit. John also chose to temporarily ignore the conversation he’d overheard. As the Prime Minister came around the corner after Morris, obviously not content to let Morris have the last word, John decided to step in. If he had the authority to send the both of them to separate corners like he did with Jesse and Torren, he would. As it was, he deflected.

“Major, there you are. In my rush to escape the ravening diplomats, I seem to have forgotten my recent injuries, and they’ve decided to remind me of their existence,” John forced out between clenched teeth, the admission of weakness in front of the British Prime Minister hurting almost as much as his leg. Now that the small surge of adrenaline he’d felt while trying to get into place early enough to prevent the murder of a foreign country’s public official had worn off, his leg was screaming. Carson and Pasha were going to kill him for overdoing it, especially since he couldn‘t blame it on the Wraith.

“So I see, sir.” Morris saluted again, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth, and John was relieved that the rage he’d heard in the Major’s voice earlier was able to be thrown off so quickly.

He was beginning to genuinely like the Major, even though he’d replaced John on AR-1 and was the one sharing missions and in-jokes with Rodney, Ronon, and Teyla.

Morris offered his crooked arm to John with an insubordinate smirk, saying smarmily, “If you’d permit an inferior officer to ease his mind and assist you back to the ravening hordes, sir, it would be greatly appreciated.” John growled at Morris without deigning to answer, suppressing the urge to grin as he slung a companionable arm around Morris’s shoulders (‘accidentally’ smacking the Major upside the head in the process), and let the slighter man take the weight off John’s damned leg. Morris might be little, but he was a Marine. Thank God for the Marines. Not that he’d ever say that out loud; the Air Force would never let him hear the end of it. Neither would the Marines.

As much as John would have preferred to have Morris help him down to the infirmary, the British Prime Minister (and John really wished he could remember his name) was still following him and Morris, which meant courtesy demanded they head back to the mess hall and the horde of diplomats. John just had to stick it out until the end of lunch, and then Woolsey would take over and John would be free to hobble down to the infirmary.

John’s radio pinged with a request for a private transmission, and he touched the radio in his ear to accept. “Sheppard, we may have a situation,” Rodney’s voice said calmly over the private channel. John stopped walking, forcing Morris to stutter to a stop as well.

“What sort of situation are we talking about?” John asked evenly, despite the immediate certainty that whatever disaster was looming had something to do with both Jesse and the inbound Leviathans. Please don’t let him have adopted a giant sentient spaceship for a pet, he begged silently to whoever was listening.

“The sensors are detecting an unknown energy near you, and Atlantis is threatening to go into lockdown,” Rodney said, sounding slightly bemused. “As in, she’s started spamming Jesse—who escaped his room almost as soon as you locked him in it and has been hiding out with me, by the way—with images of lockdowns and you, as of five or so minutes ago.” John gritted his teeth in annoyance at his son, but at least Rodney had been around him to let John know. He wondered why Atlantis hadn’t said anything to him. Come to think of it, he’d been oddly alone in his head all morning.

Five-ish minutes ago, he’d trailed Morris and the British Prime Minister out of the mess.

“Is she adamant about this, or does she want something?” John asked Rodney, trying to keep things vague enough that at least one of his listeners wouldn’t know what he was talking about. He was pretty sure none of the dignitaries were in the loop about Atlantis’ sentience. It was too far-fetched to be believed without first-hand experience, so the Lantean personnel and visiting ATA-carriers tended to keep it on the down-low. Plus, John knew that most powerful people would see a flying, sentient, armed city as a threat. They’d try to kill her somehow, and then force the expedition live in her corpse. He wasn’t going to let that happen, not ever—and General O’Neill had agreed the one time John had brought it up. No one above O’Neill in the command structure, including the President of the United States, knew the truth of Atlantis, and they planned to keep it that way.

“Segregation,” Rodney paused. “Apparently, Atlantis wants the ‘mean man’ in the brig, according to Jesse,” he added.

“I don’t see that happening,” John said, surreptitiously eyeing both Morris and the British Prime Minister. “Can she locate the signature?”

“The life sign about that’s about six feet from you is the one emitting the energy,” Rodney answered, sounding slightly distracted. “I think I’ve managed to calibrate our sensors to detect the energy now. It was only Atlantis who first noticed it; it didn’t show up on our sensors at all. I haven’t seen anything like it before, and I’ve seen a lot of energy readings.”

“That’s great, Rodney, but I can’t comply with her wishes without causing an international incident. Can we compromise, here?”

“One sec,” Rodney said, then was radio silent for an awkward moment. John pretended like he was still listening to his radio, and watched the Prime Minister in his peripheral vision. He didn’t look like he was doing anything other than being bored, though John wondered why he hadn’t just gone ahead by now. Maybe he was just curious, or maybe he was waiting for a chance to get Morris alone again. The fact that Atlantis was suspicious was enough to erase the benefit of the doubt from John’s mind. “Ok, she’ll settle with one of the labs. Get down here to L3, and we’ll figure out just what this energy is. Whoever it is might not know they’re emitting it, which could be dangerous for them. It also seems to be blocking you from hearing her, if we’re translating what she’s trying to say correctly.”

“Affirmative,” John replied. “Move Jesse.”

“Yeah, already happening. She doesn’t want him anywhere near this energy thing. I’m sending him with Radek to Jumper Two, just in case shit goes down—I’ll swear if I want, pipsqueak—” John assumed the aside was for Jesse, “and he’ll have a radio so he can keep translating for us.”

“On our way,” John replied. He nudged Morris and they started walking again, quicker than before. “If you wouldn’t mind accompanying us, Prime Minister, there’s a situation I need to take care of in the labs, and it’s against regulations to have a visiting civilian unaccompanied on base.”

“I’ll be fine, I can find my way back to the dining hall from here,” the Prime Minister said quickly.

“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s against regulations. Please, you’d make my life much easier if we didn’t have to walk all the way back to the mess before hitting the transporter,” John poured it on thick. “And I’m afraid I over-exerted my injury, and wouldn’t be able to do without Morris’s aid at this time. If you’ll accompany us to the labs, I’ll have one of the scientists see you back to the mess hall,” he added before the Prime Minister could raise that objection.

Morris, on John’s other side, where the Prime Minister couldn’t see him, was fighting a smirk. John gripped his shoulder tightly, and Morris’s face blanked immediately. Morse code would take too long, and John didn’t know what languages the Prime Minister knew, so he really didn’t have a way to inform the Major that they needed to get the Prime Minister to Lab Three. John hoped Morris would follow his lead here as well as he’d done in the field.

“Alright, I don’t want to be a bother,” the Prime Minister agreed. John squeezed Morris’s shoulder again as they headed to the closest transporter, which was back the way they’d come, away from the dining hall. Morris didn’t say anything, but quickened the pace.

Lab Three was empty except for Rodney when they got there. Once John, Morris, and the British Prime Minister entered the room, the door slid shut and sounded the tone that meant the deadlock had engaged. John stepped over to Rodney’s side of the room, dragging Morris with him, when the Prime Minister turned to look at the closing door.

“What’s going on here?” the Prime Minister asked angrily once he’d turned back to see the three of them facing him down.

“That depends,” Rodney replied easily. “What can you tell us about the energy readings you’re giving off? The ones that are strong enough to give our tech monitoring the feeds in the security center heart palpitations-” John assumed that tech was Atlantis herself, “-and cause her to her issue the urgent recommendation for a city-wide lockdown?”

Morris grimaced and nudged John, distracting him from the fish face the Prime Minister was making. “You know that thing as big as the Lady, and as secret? Part of that,” he muttered.

“Not good enough,” John told Morris sternly, not muttering. “She’s scared of whatever he’s doing. It might be hurting her. We need to find out what it is and how to stop it.”

“Hurting who? I’m not hurting anyone!” the Prime Minister exclaimed.

Rodney tapped his radio. “Jesse says you’ve stolen her voice. At least I think that’s what the Little Mermaid reference means,” he relayed.

Morris tensed, and John scowled at the Prime Minister. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it. Now,” John ordered.

“Whatever you’ve got up you’ve got to drop. She can feel it, and it’s fucking causing her pain,” Morris said evenly.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you Malfoy? Trying to make me break the Statute of Secrecy? Is that your play?” the Prime Minister snarled.

He touched something in his right sleeve with his left hand, and Jesse’s voice shrieked out of the overhead speakers. “Stop it, you mean man, you’re hurting her!”

The Prime Minister’s face blanched and he dropped his hand. “Who is that? What’s happening?”

“That’s my son, who can still talk to her, even though whatever you’ve done has cut me off from her.” John growled. His patience was nearing an end. “For his safety, and hers, we’ve removed him from your vicinity; you can’t hurt him, so don’t even fucking try. If you don’t stop whatever it is you’re doing to her right now, I’m going to take it as an act of aggression and respond accordingly. So let me ask you again: Stop whatever the fuck you’re doing that’s letting off the fucking energy readings.”

The Prime Minister paled further, “I swear, I don’t know how it could hurt anyone.”

“Because you’ve never hurt anyone on accident, have you?” Morris added his two cents.

He touched his right sleeve again and said something quietly enough that John just barely caught it, though he might not have heard it right, since it didn’t make sense: “Finis sermonis.”

“That’s better,” Jesse immediately said through the overhead speakers, though John didn’t notice a change. He was still alone in his head.

“That explains it,” Morris muttered, though not quietly enough. John looked at him sharply. Morris shrugged. “Still can’t say. But… sort of like a radio,” he tapped the one in his ear that all the Lantean personnel wore.

“I’m afraid I’m going to need an explanation,” John said, but he looked over at the Prime Minister when he said it, letting Morris off the hook.

“Dad, she says you need the Chair to be better,” Jesse said into the ensuing silence, startling everyone in the room.

“Jesse, thank you, but get off the PA please,” John said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Kay, Dad, but-” Jesse continued, his tone turning wheedling.

John cut him off, “Sweetie, whatever it is, tell Radek, and he’ll make sure I know. I need to take care of this.” The overhead speakers let out a burst of static and cut out. Rodney smirked, and John guessed he had Radek or Atlantis to thank for making sure Jesse had obeyed John’s request.

Jesse’s cameo in the conversation had eased some of the tension in Lab Three, but John ratcheted it back up with a glare for the Prime Minister. He included Morris in the edge of it. “You two are withholding knowledge. I get Non-Disclosure Agreements, I do, but I think we can agree here that these are exigent circumstances. As in, there has been an assault on a foreign power, by a foreign power, on my base. This is within my jurisdiction. There is no diplomatic immunity in Pegasus, let me remind you. This is an international base, but it is not Earth. You will tell me what I need to know, or I will exercise my authority to confine you to the brig until we can dial you back to Earth, regardless of the diplomatic incident that will put on my plate.”

“And him?” the Prime Minister asked angrily, pointing at Morris. Apparently the Prime Minister was already over the shock Jesse had given him by calling him a mean man.

John raised his hand for silence when Morris opened his mouth to respond. “Major Morris is a United States Marine, and under my command. We have already discussed this topic, and he has informed me that under pain of unspecified punishment, he is not allowed to discuss this topic. I will not take advantage of his position in my command to force him to break a Non-Disclosure Agreement previous to his employment in the USMC when he is not the guilty party here. You are the one who caused someone harm, even if it was unknowingly, so you can consider this explanation part of your reparations, if it helps you make a decision.”

The Prime Minister slumped defeatedly. Morris was practically glowing with righteous glee, and John shot him a look. Morris immediately blanked his face in that way he had, and settled into parade rest.

The Prime Minister scrubbed his hands through his neat hair, roughing it up and letting John get a glimpse of a faint scar on his forehead. Must have been what Morris had been referring to during their argument. “Fine, alright. I’m Harry Potter,” he paused as if waiting for a reaction.

“They’re muggles, you nitwit,” Morris muttered from behind John, “That doesn’t mean anything to them.”

John glanced at Morris before fixing his gaze back on Potter, who muttered back, “Guess Draco Malfoy don’t mean much either, that why you did a runner?” John cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow at Potter when he had his attention again. “Yes, alright. Magic, okay? It’s magic.”


	15. In which advanced technology is, actually, distinguishable from magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Major Morris has a lot to deal with.

MORRIS

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Doctor McKay asked, throwing his arms around like they’d help him find an explanation for the idiocy confronting him. He did the same thing in the field. A lot.

“No joke,” Potter denied, letting the wand he’d had hidden in his sleeve slip down into his hand. He aimed it at the closest lab table and casted a quick “Wingardium leviosa.” Luckily there’d been nothing on it, or McKay would have shanked a bitch.

Drake rolled his eyes. “Yes, firstie charms are very impressive, Scarhead. If you’re quite done showing off—” he broke off, staring at the wand in Potter’s hand. “Are you fucking kidding me, Potter?” he asked flatly. “You’re fucking still using my wand, you asshole.”

Potter levelled the wand at Drake, eyes narrowing. “We fought, I won; it’s mine now.”

Colonel Sheppard stepped between the pointed wand and Drake, hands out at his sides. Drake noticed the way the Colonel was putting most of his weight on his left leg, and backed off quickly. McKay would never let Drake hear the end of it if the Colonel aggravated his injury by ending something Drake had started.

“Put the stick away, Prime Minister Potter,” the Colonel said, using his command voice.

 _That’s right,_ Drake thought smugly as Potter obeyed, tucking the wand back up his sleeve. _How’s it feel when people don’t automatically assume you’re in the right?_ There was a reassuring brush of a caress in his mind, and Drake stopped letting Potter get to him. Atlantis was right, and that was all long past. He was an adult now. Plus, he was a Marine. He didn’t need a wand to defend himself anymore. Not that he’d had one since Potter stole his to win the war, and Drake had immediately packed his parents off to France (with a brief detour to Azkaban for his father, though they probably had Potter to thank for the reduced sentence and lack of dementors, annoyingly enough) and left for the colonies himself. A few days into his stay in the States, a muggle recruiter for the muggle military had asked him if he’d like to earn his citizenship by being a part of a band of brothers comprised by the few and the proud, if he wanted to join a family that would never let him down and who would always be there for him if he was there for them; he’d never looked back. Loyalty to his father had led him down a dark path. Loyalty to his brothers had led him down a bright one, filled with wonders, regardless of whether his brothers were wizards (and there were a few, surprisingly enough, though Markham and Stackhouse were the only ones he knew of in Atlantis). He’d been playing muggle regardless, and hadn’t had much need for a wand since he’d joined the Marines, though he’d actually really like to try out an AK on a few fucking Wraith.

A gentle mental nudge dragged his mind back on track. “Sir,” he cleared his throat. “I can still feel her—I’ve never got as much from her as you do, but I didn’t notice any difference in my connection when you lost contact.”

McKay peered at Drake like he could somehow see beneath Drake’s skin. “Morris, are you telling me you believe in this magic bullshit too?” he asked, sounding rather like Drake had professed a belief in Nargles, instead of magic.

The Colonel groaned. “Rodney, pretend it’s just another type of science that you just haven’t figured out yet, like the Ancients’.” McKay puffed up at the insult to his understanding of the Ancients’ technology.

Drake stepped between them to prevent them from getting off track. “Colonel Sheppard, Doctor McKay. It doesn’t matter right now, I just wanted to put that on the record. Regardless, we probably need to get Potter back to his keepers before they suspect me of something and try to hunt us down. Likely by using more magic, sorry McKay,” he grinned at McKay’s expression, but sobered quickly, “and possibly hurting her again.”

“Who is this ‘her’ you all keep talking about?” Potter butted in, directing his question to the Colonel rather than to Drake. Drake was fine with that. The less he had to interact with the prat, the better off everyone would be.

“Someone who’s not a huge fan of you at the moment, Prime Minister,” the Colonel replied. “So I doubt you’ll be getting an introduction anytime soon. Besides, she’s above your clearance level.”

Potter puffed up. “There’s not much that’s above my clearance level.”

The Colonel stared him down. “This is. If and until Brigadier General O’Neill of the SGC reads you in on it, it will continue to to be above your clearance level,” he paused, and Drake watched him pull on the mask of the easy-going guy he wore most of the time. “Thank you for clearing up the confusion, by the way. I think Major Morris is right, and it’s time we got you back to the rest of the delegation.” He waved a hand at the door, which chimed the deadlock release and slid smoothly open. Atlantis must still be watching the Colonel, even if they couldn’t communicate again yet.

Of course, Zabini and Granger were arguing just on the other side of the door. They stopped when the door slid open to reveal them, and looked sheepish. Drake chanced a glance at Potter, and he looked equally as sheepish. The Colonel’s easy-going-guy mask slipped away and he looked terrifyingly furious.

Drake was just glad that look wasn’t aimed at him.

“Colonel Sheppard, my apologies, I can explain,” Granger ventured to say in the face of the Colonel’s thunderous wrath. Drake had to give her points for bravery—and deduct points for abject stupidity. Gryffindors. They never changed.

“Let me guess. You’re going to accuse USMC Major Morris, who is under my command, of something ridiculous, rather than accepting the blame yourselves for sneaking off to wander the active military base of a foreign power, one which is on constant alert for hostiles and therefore restricted to civilians not assigned to the base, and also neglect to account for your initial secretive actions that caused harm to an innocent bystander?” the Colonel asked her with impressive calmness.

Granger blinked and shut her mouth. Drake could see Potter gesticulating for both her and Zabini to shut it, and assumed that Potter was planning on explaining things to them later.

“Do not make me need to explain to my superiors why I have to boot you back through the ‘Gate before the rest of the delegation,” the Colonel said stonily. “If you keep your little sticks sheathed while you’re on Atlantis, you’ll be allowed to stay. If you use them you’ll be back through the ‘Gate faster than you can believe. And I’ll know if you do, believe me, considering Doctor McKay just updated our entire sensor network with a patch that will allow our sensors to pick up the energy readings you give off when you wave your little sticks.”

Granger’s eyes widened so much Drake wondered absently if her eyeballs were going to fall out of their sockets. He could see the questions trying to leap out of her mouth—Granger always had wanted to know everything about everything, and it was obvious that much hadn’t changed—but she kept her mouth shut, which was something that _had_ changed since school.

McKay exchanged a look with the Colonel, and led the meekly quiet wizards away, presumably back to the rest of the delegation.

Once they were out of sight, the Colonel slumped against the doorway and ran a hand through his already-messy non-regulation hair. “Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck is it with this galaxy,” he muttered, and then gestured at Drake. “Come on, Morris, I apparently need to get to the Chair room, and you’re my crutch. Fucking leg.”

“Sure you don’t want to hit the infirmary first, sir?” Drake hedged. The Colonel was starting to look awfully grey in the face.

“Believe me, the Chair on drugs is not worth it. To the Chair room, James!” he gestured grandly with his free arm as Drake tucked himself under the other, shouldering most of the Colonel’s weight.

“Sir, yes sir,” he muttered, rolling his eyes.

***

After a brief stint in the Chair the Colonel looked worse than before, though Drake didn’t know if that was the Chair’s fault or if the blame belonged to the short trek they’d made to get to the Chair in the first place. “Now shall I take you to the infirmary, sir?” Drake asked, starting to seriously worry about the ashen cast to the Colonel’s complexion.

“That would probably be a good idea, Major,” the Colonel agreed, slumping back in the Chair and not making any effort to get out of it. “But I don’t know if I can actually get up.”

“That’s just because you’re a lazy zoomie, sir,” Drake chided the Colonel. He eyed the man in the Chair and came to a quick decision. “Just warning you sir, if you sick up on me, I’ll drop you.” He grabbed one of the Colonel’s arms and quickly pulled him up from the Chair and into a fireman’s carry.

“Really?” the Colonel groaned. “Carson’s gonna laugh at me.”

“And you’ll deserve it, sir. Did you think you could maybe take the painkillers and then wait until they wore off and Carson had patched you up before using the Chair, rather than doing everything at once? No, you did not,” Drake replied absentmindedly as he carefully navigated the door to the transporter so as to not conk his commanding officer’s head against the wall.

“Snarky. I like it,” the Colonel muttered.

“That’s grand, since I’m sure Carson will have more for you, sir,” Drake replied, while he wordlessly asked Atlantis to send the transporter to the infirmary so as to not risk dropping the Colonel trying to touch the right point on the map. Atlantis complied, and the doors slid open on the infirmary.

“Not the pink scrubs,” the Colonel muttered nonsensically as Carson rushed toward them. Drake gratefully handed his commanding officer over to the tender mercies of the infirmary staff, then realized he was at loose ends. He should probably head back to the mess to supervise the dignitaries, but he wasn’t feeling very confident in his control over his temper after that confrontation with Potter. Perhaps it would be best if he avoided the mess hall.

“Oh, hey! Teyla’s here!” he heard the Colonel exclaim to exactly no one. Well, it appeared that the Colonel’s connection to Atlantis had been repaired by the Chair, and that whatever drug Carson had jabbed him with was starting to take effect. But it was also an excellent excuse for Drake to find, and subsequently hide behind, his favorite social buffer.

Drake bumped his radio to AR-1’s channel. “Teyla?” he asked.

“Major Morris, excellent timing. We are about to land in the Jumper bay,” she replied, her voice music to his ears.

“Brilliant. I’ll come escort you to this mess, shall I?” he grinned, and headed back into the transporter.

“That would be kind of you, Major Morris. But don’t you mean _the_ mess, rather than this mess?” she asked slyly.

“I’m sure you’ve figured out what I meant, minx,” he laughed. If Pansy had had a polite, badass, alien sister, her name would be Teyla. His years with AR-1 had helped dull the pangs of homesickness he still sometimes felt. Not that home would still be there if he ever tried to go back. Half his friends were dead, and the others were either in Azkaban or fled to foreign countries—except for possibly Zabini. They hadn’t spoken since Mrs. Zabini had packed him off to the Continent before the war even got fully into gear, so Drake didn’t know if Zabini still even considered them friends.

As soon as he stepped out of the transporter into the Jumper bay, Teyla gave him a look, then engulfed him in a hug. He stood awkwardly in the small circle of her arms and let her get it out of her system. She shifted her hands up to rest on his shoulders, and he lowered his forehead to meet hers. “I’m fine, promise,” he told her quietly.

“You always are," she agreed, sounding almost sad.

“Exactly,” he affirmed, putting his hands on her shoulders to give her a little shake. “Now let’s go crash this party and show them what Pegasus is made of,” he released her and slipped from under her hands to turn and offer her his arm. With a small smile, she took it just as grandly as if she were his mother.

“Let’s,” she agreed, and let him lead the way to the transporter a few feet away.

Before he finished turning, however, he noticed something off about the Jumper bay. “Oi, Markham!” he called back toward the Jumper Teyla had disembarked from. “Which Jumper is missing, do you know?” he asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Two, I think,” Markham called back. “Did the Colonel take some civvies up for a joy ride?” Drake’s stomach dropped like a stone.

“Goddammit, Jesse,” he muttered.

“What about Jesse?” Teyla asked sharply.

“I think he may have kidnapped Radek for an unsanctioned  joyride.” Drake felt like banging his head against the transporter map and letting it take him to the pier furthest from the infirmary and Colonel Sheppard. “We better go let the Colonel know, though Merlin knows if he’s coherent enough to do anything about it,” he sighed, and poked to map to take them back to the infirmary.

A few seconds later, Drake heard the ceiling exclaim, “Muuuuuuch bigger than ponies!” as soon as he and Teyla stepped into the infirmary. Jesse had evidently managed to hijack the PA system in the room his father was in again. Drake just hoped Atlantis was helping the kid, and that this wasn’t something they all had to look forward to later on, once the emergencies were sorted.

At least Drake wasn’t going to have to be the one to break the news to Colonel Sheppard about his wayward son.

“It appears Jesse has found the Leviathan,” Teyla murmured to Drake with impressive calmness.

The audio pickups for Atlantis’ PA system must be superb, because Jesse responded as if she’d been speaking to him. “Auntie ‘La! The ‘Viathans are gorgeous! And so nice!”

“That’s lovely, dear,” she told Jesse, widening her eyes a little at Drake and tilting her head over to the gurney Colonel Sheppard was struggling to sit up on, his mouth working wildly but not producing any words.

“And I’m sure your father would agree, but he’s in the infirmary on rather a lot of drugs, at the moment,” Carson didn't pause in his struggles to calm the Colonel as he spoke to the ceiling.

“Did he make you mad?” Jesse asked soberly through the PA system.

“No, laddie, he made his leg mad and now his injury from last month is acting up. Nothing to worry about, but he’d probably appreciate it if you were back on Atlantis when he wakes up,” Carson soothed the child.

“Okay,” Jesse agreed, then paused ominously. “The ‘Viathans want to know if they can come too.”

“Perhaps it’s best they stay out of sight until the diplomats leave,” Drake hedged.

“Yeah,” Jesse agreed wistfully, “They’d be so jealous.”

“Yes, exactly,” Drake agreed with relief.

“Jesse…” Teyla trailed off, grimacing. “Major Morris said you had Radek with you. Can we speak to him?”

“He’s busy,” Jesse said shortly, sounding a little cross. “He made me stay in the Jumper.”

“Are you saying he’s on board one of the Leviathan?” Teyla asked, startled.

“They wanted to say hi,” Jesse grumped.

“Can you say goodbye for now, and that you’ll both see them soon, and head back to Atlantis for us, please son?” Carson asked the ceiling, looking slightly panicked, though the Colonel seemed to have finally relaxed into unconsciousness.

“Kay, fine, we’ll come back. Are we in trouble?” Jesse asked nervously.

“No, son, I’m just worried that Radek might be ill after saying hello to the ships,” Carson assured him.

“Yes, ano, we are on our way,” Radek’s voice came over the PA system before it cut out.

Carson looked relieved, before he grimaced down at the unconscious Colonel. “Well, John’s out of commission for now. Why don’t you get Colonel Lorne into the loop, Major Morris?” Carson ordered.

Drake nodded sharply. “Teyla?” he asked simply.

She jerked her head at the transporter. “While you inform Colonel Lorne, I shall search out the delegation and inform Mr. Woolsey,” she motioned for him to get his ass in gear.

Drake patted her shoulder in silent thanks, and tapped his radio to send a request for a private channel to Colonel Lorne as he stepped back into the transporter.

***

“Colonel Sheppard is unconscious in the infirmary, Jesse’s stolen Radek and a puddlejumper to go play with the incoming armada composed of a species of giant sentient alien spaceships, and the British delegation as a whole has a grudge against you and also somehow managed to inadvertently hurt Atlantis?” Colonel Lorne repeated in disbelief.

Drake had run him down in Colonel Sheppard’s office, where the piles of paperwork were threatening to topple and bury Colonel Lorne alive as he worked through them.

“Yes, sir,” Drake affirmed from where he was standing at attention, out of range of the towering stacks of paper on the desk.

Colonel Lorne ran a hand over his face. “Of course. At ease.”

Drake relaxed his stance. “Teyla is informing Mr. Woolsey of the situation, and Jesse and Radek are on their way back to Atlantis. Carson requested that they ask the Leviathan to remain where they are at present, and Jesse agreed to relay the request,” he added.

“Right, good.” Colonel Lorne stood up, and started edging his way around Colonel Sheppard’s desk. “I’ll head down to the Jumper bay to meet them and get a full debrief. Go find Dr. McKay and let him know the situation.”

“Yes sir,” Drake snapped off a salute and beat feet out of the office.

***

Dr. McKay hadn’t responded to the radio ping for a private transmission, but that was the norm when he was engrossed in a project, so Drake hadn’t worried. Perhaps he should have, though, because when Drake found McKay, he was holed up in Lab Three again, but this time he was with Granger. Did the woman have to stick her nose in everything?

“Dr. McKay,” Drake rapped on the door frame to get his attention. Drake nodded perfunctorily at Granger in response to the slightly narrow-eyed look she sent him, and then ignored her. Couldn’t let her rile him up, not now. “Can I speak to you privately?”

Granger’s eyes narrowed further in suspicion, but she kept her mouth shut as McKay waved an absent agreement and didn’t move.

“McKay!” Drake barked in his field-commander voice, startling McKay and getting eye contact as a result. “We have another situation,” he continued normally, side-eying Granger, who was beginning to look rather dangerously intrigued. “What’s she doing here? She’s supposed to be with the rest of the delegation,” he added abruptly.

“She wanted to see the energy readings we got off her boss,” McKay noticed the anger Drake felt surging over him and waved it off. “Just the readings themselves, Morris, I know my job and I know how to take security to truly paranoid levels, so relax.”

Drake did, but just a little. “Regardless, like I said, we have a situation.” But he couldn’t just send Granger off on her own, and he hadn’t passed any guards in the hall to take her back to the delegation. It was just the three of them in this wing of the lab complex, which was the reason Dr. McKay had chosen it to segregate Scarhead and Colonel Sheppard when everything went down not half an hour ago. Perhaps he could phrase it innocuously.

“Jesse went to go meet his new friends,” he said simply. Rodney paled gratifyingly, and whirled around to start tapping away on one of his many scattered laptops in the lab.

“I assume Radek chaperoned?” Rodney asked, not looking back at Drake.

Drake glanced at Granger, who looked like she was about to explode with curiosity. “Yes, not that he had much choice.”

“Just outside the heliosphere!” something on the monitor prompted McKay to exclaim. “They’re exponentially faster without the Wraith,” he muttered. “If the alterations make that much of a difference, I wonder…” he trailed off and typed faster, lost in the science.

Drake sighed to himself. Well, he’d informed McKay. And now it looked like he was stuck with Granger, unless he wanted to let her rattle around in McKay’s lab essentially unsupervised, which he very much did not. He waved her out into the hall, and she obeyed, if reluctantly. He walked her down the hall in silence, taking the long way back to the rest of the dignitaries, because he was beginning to feel a little transporter-sick. There were only so many times the human body could be repeatedly demolecularized and reintegrated in a row before it started to rebel, and Carson hadn’t yet found a version of Dramamine that worked for disintegration.

“So, you changed your name?” Granger asked after they’d been walking silently for less than five minutes.

“Yes,” he answered shortly, rudely not granting her the _ma’am_ she was entitled to as a civilian. Not that she’d know that, but it was the simple pleasures that got him through moments like these.

“But why?” she asked gently.

Fuck her gentleness. “New life, new name,” he replied concisely. Like hell was he going to tell her that when his father had found out Drake had signed up with the muggle military in the colonies, he’d declared that no son of his would be a muggle-lover. Drake had retaliated by having Gringotts courier over his birth certificate and heading to the nearest wizard-friendly American courthouse to explain the situation. Two days before he headed off to boot camp, he officially became Drake Black Morris, and had remained so for the past 15 years—almost half his life now.

Draco Lucius Malfoy would eventually only be remembered in footnotes in Hogwarts’ history texts as just another child who died in the war after letting orders and loyalty override common sense and morals. He hadn’t spoken to his father since he’d owled over a muggle photocopy (just to drive the point home) of his new birth certificate. After his parents received the copy of his new birth certificate, his mother—whom he hadn't intended to alienate and had thus chosen his new middle name with her in mind—wrote him back. She’d said that she hoped he was doing well and that she would always love him and consider him her son, regardless of what Lucius said or did. They still exchanged letters whenever he could toss one through the wormhole back to Earth, addressed the muggle way and “℅ Sunrise Post.” (It was an American muggle/wizarding postal service Stackhouse had put him on to when Drake had raised the issue with him after transferring to Atlantis. Being able to exchange letters with his mother while on a posting in another galaxy was worth far more than the exorbitant prices they charged, even on a Major's salary. His father had disinherited him, of course, but he didn't have much else to spend his paycheque on in Pegasus. In fact, with the danger pay he was receiving in Pegasus, his net worth was beginning to approach the levels he’d been used to as a child—especially after he'd asked his mother to manage his finances. She was the financial genius in the family, after all.)

"And that's it?" Granger asked dubiously, dragging his mind back to her tedious attempts at conversation. "Not trying to hide how you ran away after the war, or make it so people couldn’t find you?"

"My name change is a matter of public record, and as such is available to anyone willing to look," he replied stiffly. "Not that it's any business of yours, as I'm an American citizen now."

They were coming up on a transporter. Sod the disintegration sickness, he'd risk it to get Granger off his case quicker. Drake gestured to the transporter. “Get in, please.” She complied without arguing, which wasn’t something he’d expected.

The doors slid shut, and everything went dark.

The transporter map was unresponsive when Drake touched it. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Drake asked in disbelief. The transporter didn’t respond, staying dark and silent, except for a rustling coming from Granger. “No, do not fucking cast a Lumos, Granger, you don’t know what it might do,” he ordered, searching his pockets. Damned dress blues—if he’d had on his BDUs he’d at least have a penlight on him, even without his offworld kit.

Granger huffed. “I can listen, you know,” she said. There was a click, and suddenly she was shining a torch right in his face. He winced and she pointed it away. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

He dismissed her apology with a flick of his hand. “Point it at the door here, maybe we can lever it open somehow.” He didn’t have much hope, but he’d rather struggle futilely with it than sit around and do nothing.

She complied, but said doubtfully, “It looks pretty seamless, though.”

“So you’d rather just sit around and get to know each other?” he asked disdainfully. He bumped his radio to ping someone—anyone—but it was unresponsive.

Granger watched him running his hands over the door for a while, before she sighed and pinned him with the torch again. At least she’d aimed it at his chest and not his face, this time. “It looks like that might be our only option,” she said, her voice filled with a truly offensive level of resignation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry not sorry about the Potter-bashing. I like Harry... But seriously, Draco got shafted in the books. He's not evil, just loyal to his family. I feel like it's high time there's good guys actually ON HIS SIDE, and not just provisionally. (Yes, I know: Snape. But he had other things going on and was understandably distracted from Draco's situation, and the double-agent thing fucked their relationship up like whoa.) Harry fucked up a lot and his people never gave up on him. It's time for Draco to experience having that kind of support.


	16. In which there is not a regrettable Vegas wedding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, so, I accidentally tripped and wrote 4k of porn? (Plus some plot? But honestly, not as much plot as porn.) Um. So. You're welcome, I guess? It's kind of intense, so see end notes for trigger warnings if you're worried.

SHAWN

Maid Marion was repeating herself. Probably because no one was listening. “You are going to have a wedding that can be best described by ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’ over my dead body,” she’d been telling Eliot for what seemed like most of the afternoon. Shawn was beside himself with boredom. _Just metaphorically, not actually beside myself_ , he felt like he had to clarify, if even just to himself, because these were the sorts of things he now found himself worrying about, ever since his introduction to the Pegasus galaxy. He wondered if Eliot would be pro or con an accidental-clone-Shawn. On the one hand, sexytimes. On the other hand, if _Multiplicity_ had taught him anything, it was to never assume his clone would do what he wanted it to. Especially since even he sometimes didn’t do what he wanted him to do. Shawn shook the thought away. That train of thought had too many passengers already, and if he kept going it’d take him down the rabbit hole.

“We only have three days left here, Sophie,” Eliot was repeating himself, starting to sound like he regretted ever mentioning the impending nuptials. “If we start the paperwork today, we might be able to get it done before our flights leave. Might. And no, we can’t postpone our flights, I’ve already told you that.”

Even though Eliot’s Merry Men knew about the beaming technology and the Jumper and the Daedalus, no one had read them in on Pegasus or Big Brother or aliens—not even the alien that had been in Eliot’s head. So while the gang of golden-hearted(ish) thieves didn’t believe the ‘Peace Corps in Africa’ story, it was still all he and Eliot were allowed to tell them. Plus, Gus didn’t know about any of it, and he had already stated his intention to essentially move in for the few days Shawn and Eliot were in town.

Shawn and Gus desperately needed quality best-friend time, after all, and he’d missed the whole first day of Shawn’s leave as Shawn had been otherwise occupied with Eliot’s naked body.

Unfortunately, Gus had caught the wedding bug from Sophie. They hadn’t even been introduced, and Sophie had only gotten in to Santa Barbara a few hours ago, but they were already thick as thieves (ironic as the saying was, when the present company was taken into account).

“I still say the best strategy is to invite everyone to lunch at that place across from the courthouse and do a ‘quick, what’s that over there?’ and get it done before anyone realizes what’s happening,” Shawn told the assembled Merry Men (plus Gus).

 _Merry men, hah!_ Shawn chortled to himself. _Marry men was exactly what they were trying to do._ He looked up and everyone was staring at him. Had he said that out loud? Oh, right, he’d been talking. “What, it’s a good plan. Plus, it means neither Henry the ex-detective or my mom the criminal psychologist will be in forced proximity to any of you for any extended amount of time. I think you-” he waved his hand at where Eliot, Sophie, Gus, Parker, and Hardison were sitting at Eliot’s kitchen table, “-would all appreciate that. And I think I’d have to invite Chief Vick and Jules and Lassy-face, too, because otherwise they’d feel left out. So do you really want a big shindig with a reception and all that fancyness, really?”

Sophie and Gus stared him down with matching glares. “Yes,” they agreed in creepy unison, and exchanged triumphant looks.

Eliot pulled a face at Shawn. Shawn pulled one back. “How about you plan to your hearts’ content,” Eliot offered, “and we set the date for next year. Will y’all calm down about it then?” Eliot winked quickly at Shawn when the two Bridezillas looked at each other consideringly.

Shawn didn’t quite know what the wink meant. Was Eliot implying that theirs would be one of those ‘engaged for forever but never actually getting around to getting married’ engagements? That Eliot wanted to sneak behind their backs and do it while no one was paying attention and get it done with no fuss and just the necessary witnesses and no guests? That he was regretting accepting/making the proposal in the first place? Shawn was getting a headache.

“You all discuss. I need to talk to Eliot,” Shawn said, sliding off his perch on the kitchen counter. He crossed the room quickly, grabbing Eliot by the shirt (he was wearing one now, which, boo) and dragging him out of the kitchen after him. Luckily Eliot allowed himself to be dragged, otherwise Shawn would have probably ended up starring in an impromptu slapstick comedy, starring as the guy trying to move the original immovable object.

Eliot let Shawn pull him out of the house and around behind the little shed Eliot kept all his mysterious gardening paraphernalia in. “Okay,” Shawn started when Eliot just raised his eyebrows at Shawn curiously. He let go of Eliot’s shirt and smoothed out the wrinkles absentmindedly as started to talk. “My head’s starting to do the thing again where I second- and third- and fourth-guess all the things, and I know that it’s because things have been off and I know that’s because we haven’t been talking a lot lately because you were busy and I was jumping to conclusions all over the place like a crazy conclusion-jumper, so I need you to tell me what that wink meant, because right now I’m at you wanting to break up because it’s too much trouble and I know that’s not what you meant, but there’s so many fucking options floating around in here now, and I don’t trust my instincts anymore when it comes to reading you because I’m only sometimes-”

Eliot cut him off by punching Shawn in the mouth. With his mouth. Gently.

Shawn focused on the press of their lips, Eliot’s hands resting on Shawn’s sides, the slick slide of Eliot’s tongue against his, and the burning tingle of the cinnamon gum Eliot had been chewing after lunch. Eliot slowed the kiss until they were essentially just breathing on each other—really-close-talking without the talking—and pressed his forehead against Shawn’s. “I don’t want to break up with you,” he said softly, patiently, and didn’t sound exasperated or even a little fed up with Shawn’s brain. Fuck knows Shawn was fed up with his own brain, so it was nice that Eliot wasn’t. “The wink meant that it doesn’t matter what they decide, we’ll do what you and I decide together. If it’s waiting a year to let them plan their little hearts out and let them play Ken and Ken with us—no, no one’s Barbie in this scenario—that’s fine. If it’s going behind their backs and doing it with just us, that’s fine. If it’s a surprise wedding we spring when they’re least expecting it, that’s fine too.” He pressed his lips briefly, chastely against Shawn’s, which for some reason lit a raging inferno under Shawn’s desire when the previous hot-and-heavy kiss had been oddly calming.

“Why are you so awesome? Don’t stop being so awesome,” Shawn heard himself murmur, but he was more concerned with sliding his hands up under Eliot’s shirt to feel the burningly hot, sculpted muscles of Eliot’s back. Shawn plastered himself against him, grinding his surprise erection against the ridge of Eliot’s iliac crest, and ducking his head so he could kiss and nibble at the defined line of tendon in Eliot’s neck. Eliot’s shirt bunched up over Shawn’s hands, baring most of Eliot’s back.

Eliot had stiffened briefly when Shawn had commenced his assault, but he got with the program gratifyingly quickly. He twisted in Shawn’s arms and pulled away for a second before pressing back into Shawn, which Shawn whined at. But then, magically, Eliot’s shirt had disappeared, leaving Shawn’s hands free to roam at will. Eliot backed Shawn up a few steps, until his back hit the wall of the shed. “You know, if they look out the window, they could probably see us,” Eliot muttered, but it didn’t sound like he cared any more than Shawn did. Shawn didn’t bother replying, spreading his legs instead so Eliot would slot neatly between them.

“You know,” Eliot said, in that deliciously growly sex (and violence) voice of his, “I’ve been thinking about the first time we did this.” He pressed his groin to Shawn’s, and Shawn moaned probably louder than he should have. “Not the first time we fucked,” Eliot continued, “before then. That time I shoved you up against the wall to shut you up, back in the beginning.”

Shawn couldn’t hold back a sound that was actually objectively really embarrassing, though he couldn’t really bring himself to care at the moment.

“You remember,” Eliot practically purred into Shawn’s ear, moving one hand from Shawn’s hip to rest lightly against his throat, the other making just enough space between them to push up Shawn’s shirt and flick open the top button of Shawn’s fly. “I didn’t notice then, but looking back, you were hard. You were getting off on me shoving you up against the wall and cutting off your air.” The pressure of Eliot’s hand tightened incrementally against Shawn’s throat. Shawn bucked his hips into the space between them, looking for friction, as Eliot’s fingers trailed teasingly lightly over the remaining buttons of Shawn’s fly. Eliot didn’t say anything more, didn’t do anything more, and was solid and unmoving as a rock when Shawn tried to pull him in closer.

Shawn swallowed. “Yes,” he whispered hoarsely. Eliot’s fingers weren’t nearly tight enough yet to restrict his air or voice, but for some reason Shawn still found it hard to speak. “I was so hard I thought I was going to die. I was afraid I was going to come in my pants before you let me go,” he confessed in a rough whisper. It almost felt like saying it out loud would make it not come true, like a birthday candles wish, and it was a struggle to get the words out. “I didn’t want you to let me go. I jacked off in the bathroom of the salon.”

Eliot’s fingers tightened a little more, like a reward. Shawn wished he could purr, and also that Eliot would fucking touch Shawn’s cock already. Shawn bucked his hips against air again, but this time he was rewarded with the undoing of another button on his fly.

Shawn was a quick learner. “I wanted you to make me, even though you knew I wanted it. I wanted you to decide,” that got him another button. “I wanted you to make me come, and watch me, and think I was sexy,” another button, and tightening fingers. “I wanted you to make me come, and make me pass out, and be pressing me up against the wall when I came to,” the last button, and fingers tight enough to make him cough. He forced himself to keep going, even as Eliot’s magic fingers pushed down Shawn’s jeans and slid into Shawn’s boxers, stroking Shawn’s cock gently. “I wanted to come to with you kissing me and telling me I was good and beautiful and sexy and your cock would be out and you’d be jacking off because you were so turned on you couldn’t not,” Shawn managed to force out before Eliot’s fingers tightened enough that talking or breathing wasn’t possible anymore.

Eliot’s fingers disappeared briefly from Shawn’s cock and throat, but before he could get the breath to complain Eliot’s jeans were unbuttoned and pushed down and Eliot was right up against him, Eliot’s chest pressed tight to Shawn’s, his hand back on Shawn’s cock and holding it against Eliot’s, his forearm pressing chokingly tight to Shawn’s throat, his mouth covering Shawn’s as Eliot kissed him desperately. Shawn shook as he came, spots dancing against the dull redness of the backs of his eyelids. He didn’t even remember closing his eyes. Shawn shuddered, and hot slickness exploded between them. His lips tingled and buzzed as Eliot kept kissing him through it. Shawn’s cock burned with oversensitivity as Eliot’s hand kept moving over it and his own, quicker and rougher than before. Darkness was encroaching on the dull redness of the backs of Shawn’s eyelids, and he heard Eliot’s growl echoing all around him like he’d fallen into a deep dark cave. The monster in the dark was here for him, but it was going to save him. It was going to eat Shawn up because it loved him so, and Shawn would be safe forever.

***

Shawn blinked, and blinked again, and color started coming back into the world. The inside of his throat burned, and his body wanted him to cough, but he forced it back. Gentle fingers were rubbing the outside of his throat, making the impending bruises flare bright in his mind, but the touches somehow made the hurt feel good. Light, gentle touches kept brushing his face. He blinked again, and the world was beige and tan and pink and green. In a rush, everything came back to him in high definition clarity and Dolby Digital surround sound. Shawn whimpered with overstimulation as his cock tried immediately to get hard again. The soft touches on his face stopped, and the beige thing pulled away until it resolved into Eliot’s face, which looked horrendously guilty and filled with concern.

“Are you okay?” Eliot asked roughly. “God, I’m sorry, I never should have-” Shawn fumbled a hand up to slap it over Eliot’s mouth.

“Holy shit, don’t apologize,” Shawn croaked roughly. “That was amazing.”

Eliot relaxed against him, and Shawn realized he was still pressed up against the wall of the shed. How was he even standing? He looked down. Oh. Eliot was holding him up.

“You actually fucking made my fantasy come true,” he whispered, amazed. “You’re so fucking perfect, are you kidding me?” That was as much as Shawn’s throat was apparently willing to give him, though, and he fell into a coughing fit that burned like fire in his abused throat.

Eliot held him close and stroked his back until Shawn was able to control his coughing. His touches seemed less frantic now, more confident.

“You’re going to have to start wearing those douchey hipster scarves you hate so much,” Eliot told him wryly, “or try to explain the bruises in a way that won’t land me in jail.” Eliot turned his head so he could nip lightly at Shawn’s fingers, which had slipped from Eliot’s lips to his cheek during Shawn’s coughing jag.

 _Carson’s going to laugh his ass off when we get back_ , Shawn thought in agreement. He started to rearrange himself so he could take his own weight, now that he apparently had control over his own limbs again.

He glanced over at the picture window leading into Eliot’s kitchen, and gave the stunned and wide-eyed faces looking back a big grin and two very emphatic thumbs-up with the arms that were once again somehow mysteriously wrapped around Eliot’s bare, slightly sweaty back. “I think our audience will agree that it was enthusiastically consensual,” he whispered carefully, and was rewarded with a distinct lack of coughing.

Eliot’s forehead thumped down on Shawn’s shoulder. “They saw?”

“They saw a lot,” Shawn agreed in a whisper, just now noticing that Eliot’s jeans were puddled around his ankles. His hands crept down of their own accord to grab some luscious handfuls. He squeezed, and Eliot shifted against him. “Try for an encore?” he asked quietly, not holding out much hope since his own dick was still determinedly and depressingly soft, even with all the sunlit eye candy pressed up against him. Eliot shifted against him again, and Shawn realized that Eliot was, amazingly, hard. “I know I felt you come,” he whispered, bemused but not complaining.

“It’s sick,” Eliot said harshly, voice full of self-loathing. “I got off and I’m still hard. I shouldn’t be turned on by you all limp and bruised in my arms because I made you that way.”

“Not sick,” Shawn argued, his voice hoarse with more than bruising now. He slipped his hands off Eliot’s shoulders and let them trail slickly through the sweat on Eliot’s flanks, sliding to his knees in the small space between Eliot and the wall of the shed. “Hot,” he forced himself to look up from the way Eliot’s cock was so hard it twitched with every heartbeat, making himself meet Eliot’s eyes. “Brain-meltingly hot. Exceedingly well-matched set of kinks.” His gaze slid inexorably from Eliot’s eyes back down to Eliot’s cock. “You should fuck my throat,” Shawn said hoarsely, licking his lips and letting them part softly.

Eliot jerked back, and Shawn’s hands darted out without his input to grab at Eliot’s thighs. “No! Are you kidding? You should see a doctor before the bruises get any worse, there might be swelling,” Eliot protested weakly.

Shawn watched a bead of precome bead up in the slit of Eliot’s cock, and licked his lips again as dripped off the head and trailed down the prominent vein on the underside of Eliot’s cock. Eliot’s cock was so hard now that it was creeping up to lay almost flush against Eliot’s stomach. Shawn dug his teeth into his bottom lip, mesmerized. He had to release it so he could repeat himself. “You should really fuck my throat right now.” Even the rough, cracked sound of his own voice was sending exploding bursts of pins and needles all through him. “I need it, El, please,” he pleaded. “I want you to.”

Eliot groaned deep in his chest, and his hands came hesitantly forward to thread themselves through Shawn’s hair.

Shawn could feel his disheveled clothes—rucked up, bunched down, twisted—pulling awkwardly at his limbs. The come smeared on his stomach and cock was tightening on his skin as it dried, tugging painfully at the hairs caught in it. But it all just intensified the shivery lightning running through his veins. He let his mouth drop open, feeling the saliva filling his mouth spill over his lips as Eliot’s hands twisted in Shawn’s hair and pulled him in close, pressing Shawn’s watering mouth up against the underside of Eliot’s cock. Shawn whined, and coughed, and burned. One of Eliot’s hands released its grip in Shawn’s hair to wrap around his cock, stroking it once, twice, smearing precome and Shawn’s spit over it. It was all Shawn could see, the only thing in his world. Eliot’s hand gripped tighter, then pulled his cock away from his body, angling it toward Shawn’s mouth.

“Yeah, baby, you look so pretty for me. Are you going to beg me for it, babe?” Eliot’s voice was a growl so deep Shawn could barely hear it. “Hm, sugar?” he continued, dragging out his words in a long drawl. “You going to tell me how bad you want it, baby? Make me happy?”

“Want it so bad,” Shawn heard someone whisper, but didn’t pay attention. Eliot’s cock was so close now. “Want you to shove it down my throat, burn me, brand me, make me choke, make me hurt, make me take it, make me yours,” someone was saying hoarsely. Shawn pulled against the hand in his hair holding him back, straining to get closer. “Please, please, please, give it to me, let me have it,” someone was begging. The hand in his hair let him get a little closer. Eliot’s hand on his cock moved it to paint Shawn’s lips with the precome now dripping steadily, almost streaming out of his slit. “I want it,” someone begged, almost sobbing with need. “Please.”

The hand in Shawn’s hair twisted tight, shifted the angle of his head just so, and began to drag him forward onto Eliot’s cock. Shawn swallowed convulsively, his throat burning, and the hand just kept pulling, dragging him farther and farther down Eliot’s cock until it slotted into Shawn’s aching throat, burning him up, choking him. Shawn’s throat spasmed, but the rest of him stayed limp. He hung from the hand in his hair, supported by it and Eliot’s cock buried in his throat, slumping against the burning hot, sticky skin that was everywhere. Shawn moaned around the burning in his throat, hot tears leaking from his eyes, and resisted when the hand tried to pull him away. Tried to take Eliot’s cock away. He tried to resist, but the hand dragged him away, off Eliot’s cock, and forced him to look up. Eliot was towering over him, arching over him, supporting himself with one hand against the wall of the shed, gloriously naked. Shawn met Eliot’s eyes. Eliot’s pupils were dilated so wide there was no ring of color around them. Shawn whined, and shuddered, licking his lips, air burning through his throat and into his lungs. Air wasn’t what he needed.

The hand let him look away, back down at Eliot’s cock. The hand dragged him forward again, and Shawn welcomed the burning push of Eliot’s cock back down his throat. He worked his mouth and tongue as much as he could this time, desperate to not be dragged away again. He would do better. He’d be so good. The hand loosened its stinging grip on Shawn’s hair, caressed the strands. Shawn was good, he’d done well. The hand tightened again, but it only pulled him back a little before dragging him back down. Shawn kept working his mouth, sealing his lips as tight as he could and trying to suck more of Eliot’s cock into his mouth. The hand stopped guiding his head and instead held it still, Eliot’s cock shoving its way down his throat on its own, burning down then dragging out, faster and faster, Eliot’s balls swinging to bump Shawn’s saliva-wet chin with every downstroke of Eliot’s cock in Shawn’s throat. The drag out was beginning to burn worse than every fiery push down Shawn’s throat, and he could feel tears slicking his cheeks.

Shawn choked and moaned and coughed and swallowed, bitter spunk slipping stingingly down his throat. Eliot’s cock began to soften on his tongue, and he gentled his mouth around it. He didn’t want it to go. Eventually, when Eliot’s cock was completely soft, the hand gently pulled him away from it. Shawn’s eyes were closed, and he didn’t open them. He didn’t want it to be over, and if he didn’t look, it wouldn’t he. He was gently manhandled until he was laying on the grass, hot slick skin wrapped all around him, digesting him. Protecting him. He let himself drift away.

***

Shawn woke up warm, disheveled, covered in come, and being spooned in the garden by a very, very naked Eliot. At least it wasn’t cold out, even though it was the middle of October, thanks to Santa Barbara’s current unseasonable heat wave.

His throat was sore, but not as sore as he’d expected, considering what it had gotten up to earlier. How much earlier, he didn't know. The sun had shifted in the sky, but he wasn't one of the Bear Grylls types who could tell the time of day just from where the sun was in the sky; that's what clocks were for. He didn't want to move though, and definitely not far enough to be able to check a clock. He was also fairly sure he was all that was protecting Eliot's modesty from nosy neighbors and curious house guests. Eliot was wedged between Shawn and the little garden shed. His limbs wrapped around Shawn in an absolutely adorable sleep hug. Shawn almost felt like he might float up into the sky if Eliot let go, so it was probably best if he stayed right where he was; at least until Eliot woke up.

“You awake?” Eliot’s arms tightened briefly around Shawn.

Shawn shook his head. Nope, not awake yet. Not if awake meant moving. He didn’t want to float away. He felt Eliot press a smile to the back of Shawn’s neck.

“I guess that’s one question answered about the wedding,” Eliot said lazily, one of his arms moving so he could slide a hand down Shawn’s forearm and tangle their fingers together. Shawn rolled his head to the side, trying to tilt it back far enough to see Eliot’s face, but he just wasn’t that bendy. Eliot took it for the question it was, though, and continued, “Well, you can’t say vows when you can’t say anything louder than a whisper, can you?” Eliot’s voice was hoarse and cracked, almost like he’d been the one choked out followed by liberal application of cock to the throat. “Not that I’m complaining,” Eliot whispered, cuddling up impossibly closer to the line of Shawn’s back. His skin was burning Shawn through his clothes, and Shawn suddenly hoped their naked outdoor shenanigans hadn’t resulted in some truly awkward sunburn for Eliot.

Shawn was distracted from Eliot’s possible sunburn when something buzzed. It kept buzzing. Shawn worried briefly about bees and exposed sensitive parts, but the pattern wasn’t like any insect- Oh. It was Eliot’s SGC burn phone, in the jeans that were inexplicably half-buried beneath the tomato plants, just a few feet in front of them. Shawn’s was still somewhere in the kitchen, wherever Eliot had put it after he’d finished talking to Hardison this morning.

Eliot half-sat up and draped himself over Shawn to reach for his pants, almost like he was also worried Shawn was going to float away if Eliot wasn’t tethering him to the ground.

“Spencer,” he growled into it, not moving from his sprawl over Shawn. “No,” his muscles tightened, making him feel less like a warm blanket draped over Shawn and more like an attractive pile of iron girders. “We’ve still got three days left in our leave, are you shitting me?”

Eliot was quiet for a long time, listening to whoever was on the other end of the phone. Shawn lazily wished he could see Eliot’s expression, so he could have a clue to figuring out what was being discussed, but didn’t want to know enough to bother moving. “Yes, sir,” Eliot finally said, his tone flat. He hung up with extreme prejudice, going limp against Shawn for a brief moment.

“What?” Shawn asked, voice rough but no longer the cracked croak it had been earlier.

“Jesse’s AWOL, Sheppard’s in the infirmary, some unscheduled visiting diplomats have managed to hurt the city, and O’Neill’s sending a car for us in fifteen,” Eliot explained concisely. He got ahold of his jeans and dragged them back behind Shawn. Going off the wriggling behind him, Shawn figured he was struggling into them while lying down.

“Jesse’s AWOL?!” Shawn exclaimed. His brain seemed to be working on a five-second delay at the moment, but the cold wash of fear that ran through him when he processed that news washed the rest of the lassitude out of his system. He twisted around to grab at Eliot’s shoulder. “Did he get kidnapped? Do the Wraith have him? Is he okay?” he asked too loudly and too fast, triggering another coughing fit.

Eliot steadied him as Shawn hunched over, trying to stifle his coughs in his shoulder. “He’s fine. He took Jumper Two and Radek for a joyride, but he’s not back yet, and there’s some sort of complication O’Neill wouldn’t tell me over the phone. I just know he wants your gene back on Atlantis while Sheppard’s in the infirmary,” Eliot told him softly, almost whispering into Shawn’s ear. Right, Non-Disclosure Agreements. The fact that Eliot was being so quiet about this when not very long ago they’d been much louder and much more naked made Shawn wonder if Eliot might have some exhibitionist tendencies they should definitely explore more thoroughly later.

Shawn was still hunched over, but his coughing had subsided, so when he let his face drop away from his shoulder he had a prime view of the hot mess he was. His fly was gaping wide open, though Eliot had evidently tucked his dick back into his boxers while Shawn was out of it. His shirt was rucked up almost to his armpits, but it was the gallons of come covering Shawn’s stomach and splattering his clothes that made him flush as red as one of Eliot’s prize tomatoes. “I think we need to shower before that car gets here,” Shawn muttered, tugging his shirt down and doing up his fly.

Eliot leaned away to grab his shirt and Shawn stilled, pausing to assess himself. Nope, not floating into the stratosphere, though he felt a little off—and slightly chilly—without Eliot’s sweaty heat blanketing his back. Eliot stood and came around in front of Shawn to offer him a hand up. “Yeah,” Eliot muttered hoarsely, looking Shawn over, and Shawn met his eyes to see Eliot’s pupils swallowing his irises again. Eliot swallowed, and twitched the fingers still hovering in front of Shawn. Shawn took the hand, and Eliot yanked him up with more power than Shawn had been expecting, plastering him against Eliot’s front. “This might be a little more ‘Show and Tell’ than even the SGC would be comfortable with,” Eliot agreed. He backed away after a too-brief a moment, despite the hard ridge in his jeans Shawn had just felt being pressed against his hip.

Eliot winced and stuck a hand down his jeans to adjust himself, and Shawn watched intently until Eliot finished and grabbed Shawn’s chin to force eye contact, though Shawn could tell Eliot was suppressing a grin. “I’ll cover you; run upstairs and take first shower while I let them yell at me, then you can throw stuff in our duffles while I scrub down. Hopefully we’ll be out of here before they get their second wind.”

Shawn couldn’t stop himself from reaching out to brush Eliot’s cheek with just the tips of his fingers. “Seriously, perfect,” Shawn told him quietly, before Eliot turned away to lead the way into the house. But Eliot didn’t turn away fast enough for Shawn not to catch the soft look in his eyes or the shy smile on his lips. Shawn had never seen that smile before, but he had a feeling he was going to be seeing it again.

***

They’d managed, somehow, to make it out of Eliot’s house unscathed by the vicious, uninvited houseguests. (Because, come to think of it, not a one of them had been invited. They’d all just showed up without warning.) None of them had taken the news Shawn and Eliot were being recalled—to “Kenya”—with good grace. (Especially since Shawn and Eliot had neglected to make any decisions about how and/or when they were planning to get married.) Shawn had noticed, however, that they all had had trouble meeting his and Eliot’s eyes. On the one hand, it made their goodbyes completely uncomfortable. On the other hand, it made the goodbyes—and the arguments—much, much quicker. So even if his and Eliot’s accidentally-exhibitionist sexytimes in the garden hadn’t been brain-meltingly hot, Shawn wouldn’t have regretted anything.

The car had picked them up and taken them to the designated spot where either the _Odyssey_ or the _Daedalus_ beamed them directly from the car into O’Neill’s office at the SGC. (Both BC-304s were in orbit at the moment, and while Shawn wanted to know who exactly was beaming him up and down, he didn’t want to know enough to show off his abused voice and ask; no one conveniently mentioned it unprompted, unfortunately for his cat-like curiosity.)

O’Neill gave them the rundown of all the different ways Pegasus had exploded in the two days they’d been gone; Shawn was surprised there hadn’t been any actual explosions. “And, last of all,” O’Neill continued after a brief pause for them to digest the SITREP, “Atlantis seems to have decided to trap Major Morris and one of the British delegation in one of the transporters, and no one can get Atlantis to let them loose or explain why she trapped them in the first place. Colonel Lorne, when we last dialed Atlantis, was considering resorting to C-4. So, Spencer—” he narrowed his eyes at both of them, “Mr. Spencer, that is, not Corporal Spencer—you can see why we’d like you back on Atlantis as soon as possible. I’d prefer we save causing pain to the sentient being the base is located inside as an absolute last resort, and C-4, no matter how carefully applied, runs the risk of injuring the people we are trying to rescue. We have already removed the rest of the diplomats from Atlantis—barring the rest of the British delegation, who refused to leave their buddy behind; admirable, but annoying—citing an approaching armada as the reason they needed to evacuate. We may have neglected to mention that the approaching armada had been identified and was friendly, but you know how it is in the moment, you forget to mention something and everything snowballs.”

General O’Neill grinned, looking enough like Jesse in that moment that Shawn briefly suspected yet another unknown family member—but that was crazy. Crazy, crazy thoughts. He shook it out of his head, and winced as his bruises twinged.

“What’s that?” General O’Neill asked sharply, standing from his chair to lean over his desk and peer at Shawn’s neck. Shawn felt himself blush. He glanced over at Eliot, who refused to meet his eyes, but had flushed from his hairline to his collar; brighter red than Shawn had ever seen him. General O’Neill snickered, and collapsed back into the chair behind his desk. “Stop off by the infirmary before you hit the ‘Gate room,” General O’Neill told them between chortles. “I think Mal Doran is somewhere on base; get her to show you how to use the Goa’uld healing device before you go back to Atlantis,” he told them, waving them out of his office and poking at the smartphone on his desk, which he’d set aside with relief when they’d beamed down into his office.

Vala wasn’t in the infirmary, but the on-call doctor paged her for them. When she finally showed up, she looked at the marks on Shawn’s neck and the looks on their faces and burst out laughing. “Come on, now, you’ve got to tell me how exactly that happened. Consider it payment. You tell me a story, and I’ll teach you how to use this fancy Goa’uld healing device to wipe the evidence away, yeah?”

Eliot looked like he was going to object, but Shawn really didn’t want to have to explain to Jesse—or Jesse’s father, or Carson, or Mr. Woolsey, etc.—the details of what he and Eliot got up to in the bedroom (or, well, the garden). Shawn upped the ante, “If you’ll look around for one for Atlantis, you’ve got a deal.”

Vala grinned, delighted, and agreed; Shawn pretended he didn’t see Eliot slumping down to sit on a gurney and hiding his face in his hands. Shawn motioned Vala in close, and then whispered in her ear for quite a while. He didn’t want to leave anything out, because, well. It was, and always will be, fucking hot. And if the story made the rounds, which he assumed it would, he wanted everyone to know and be jealous of just exactly how much of a catch Eliot was when it came to the sexytimes.

Vala fanned herself with a hand when Shawn finally pulled back. “Woof. Okay,” she turned to Eliot, who was sitting on a gurney and had his face buried in his hands, hair draping over everything like he was trying to cosplay Cousin It. “Get over here, you sexy beast,” she paused to _raowr_ at him, “a deal’s a deal.”

***

Shawn checked his neck in the hand mirror one of the infirmary staff had lent him just one more time before they left for the ‘Gate room. All his bruises were gone, wiped away, like marker from a whiteboard. He kind of missed the constant reminder of Eliot’s hand on his throat, the way the bruising had still sort of felt like Eliot’s hand was resting there, but the bruising had come up spectacularly between leaving the house and Vala making him look at his neck in the mirror for a “before” and “after” comparison. Before Eliot had used the device, a red and purple handprint had stared back at Shawn in the mirror. Now it was just his normal, boring neck. But, Shawn had agreed with Eliot (not that he’d let him know) that it had kinda looked like he was either in a horribly abusive relationship (so not) or like he’d narrowly escaped being murdered by a psychopath.

Plus, being able to speak normally again was a definite upside. So, even though it looked like they wouldn’t be getting up to any extreme sexy shenanigans any time soon, he had high hopes for when Vala got them a Goa’uld healing device for Atlantis. And Shawn knew Vala would come through for them. He might have possibly promised her stories regarding the future uses of said healing device, but that was okay, since what Eliot didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Shawn. He couldn’t wait for her to come through, because a Goa’uld healing device that only Eliot could use meant Eliot would probably be required to keep it on him at all times, which meant it would live in their quarters, which meant no lingering evidence and no awkward questions, which meant everyone would be happy. Especially Shawn. And Eliot. And probably Vala.

Eliot wrestled the mirror out of Shawn’s hands and gave it back to the orderly who’d lent it to them. “Yes, you’re beautiful, now come on. Let’s go home before something else happens,” Eliot said, and Shawn would have bridled at the way the ‘you’re beautiful’ had genuinely sounded like an insult, except Eliot tilted Shawn’s head back and dropped a light kiss right where the darkest bruising had been on Shawn’s neck—right in the middle of the infirmary, with the staff bustling all around their little island of stillness, completely ignoring the PDA happening right in front of them.

Shawn did not melt. He was not a melter. He might have kept his fingers over that kiss on his neck until he stepped out the other side of the ‘Gate to Atlantis, though, just to make sure it stayed with him to the other side.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild (though I'm not sure I even know what mild means anymore) undiscussed D/s, totally consensual, but with no scenes or safewords (Yes, I know, but it's fiction, so... That's no excuse. I hope I made it clear during the action that the last thing Eliot wants to do is hurt Shawn for realsies) :/ Also, subspace and breathplay and painplay and loss of consciousness, if those are triggers for anyone.


	17. In which it sucks to be Drake Morris

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Handwaving some canon history and relationships that I was sure had been mentioned in the books but seem to have originated in fanon instead.

HERMIONE

Draco Malfoy was not the same man he’d been before. _Well, obviously_ , Hermione huffed at herself.

But it went deeper than the name change, and deeper than the changes the years and military had made to his appearance. _Must remember to call him Drake—no, that’s too familiar. This is Malfoy, after all. Major Morris, then. Even in my head, or otherwise I’ll end up calling him Malfoy out loud, which will probably end poorly_ , Hermione made a mental note.

It was so odd, though; ‘Major Morris’ made him sound like an adult. _Though I guess he is_ , she reminded herself, bemused. They were all adults, now, even the children who’d been first years when Voldemort was finally defeated. _Despite whether we might feel like adults._

Major Morris was ignoring her, focusing his attention on the seamless door holding them hostage in this strange, extra-galactic lift.

Hermione took the opportunity afforded her by his determined pretense she wasn’t there, and studied him. It was clear that if she’d not had any preconceptions clouding her judgement, she would have thought him a quiet, competent, brave (going off all the medals on his chest) officer with a sly sense of humor. (She’d probably have also thought him quite fit, annoyingly.) His hair was much shorter than before, maybe a little darker, and his face was even more angular than it had been in school, but he wore it well. He seemed to have grown into himself, rather than the clone of his father he’d seemed to have been aspiring to grow into during school.

But Hermione couldn’t stop herself from wondering what his endgame was. What could he possibly hope to accomplish in another galaxy? She’d think he was doing it for the glory, but from what little she’d seen on this trip she knew none of it would be declassified until they were all long dead, if ever. “Why are you here?” she caught herself asking. She grimaced, but let it stand. She wanted to know, after all, and it wasn’t like either of them were accomplishing much else at the moment.

“Because the bloody transporter decided to malfunction,” he told the wall, his head bowed against it almost like he was praying.

“No, well yes, but why are you _here_ , in the Pegasus galaxy, on Atlantis?” she clarified.

He turned to look at her for the first time since he’d started in on the door. It was difficult to meet his eyes, so she looked away to fiddle with the torch, sitting it upright on its base. The reflections and ambient glow lit the little lift well enough, as long as he was done with his minute inspection of the door. “Because my commanding officer told me I’d been assigned away from my unit in Afghanistan,” he said flatly. “It’s the military, Granger. We don’t often get input on our postings.”

“So why join the military, then? If it’s all following orders-” she caught herself about to reference how little he’d seemed to like orders during the war, and rephrased on the fly, “-what if the orders are wrong, or you want to argue, or you know better…” she trailed off. Her rephrasing on the fly hadn’t gone as well as she’d hoped. She really wished she was as quick-witted in awkward conversations as she was in everything else, but she supposed everyone had areas they weren’t proficient in, as much as it rankled.

Major Morris narrowed his eyes at her, but he answered. “Then I don’t follow them, or I argue, or I inform my commanding officer that there is knowledge he doesn’t have that may affect either the outcome of the orders given or the mission at hand. Any of which actions may result in a court martial, or brig time, or a black mark, or a commendation, depending on the situation and the commanding officer in question. None of which will result in the murder or torture of my loved ones. Is that what you wanted to know, Granger?” he asked coldly, his tone dismissive.

“No,” Hermione wrapped herself in courage, and was rewarded with a curious look from Major Morris. “Why did you join the muggle military? I mean, you were my main competition for top marks in school. You were—are—brilliant. You could have done anything, but now you don’t even have a wand.”

He scoffed. “Are you saying soldiers don’t need to be smart, Granger? You? When you supposedly won the war with research?” She noted that he didn’t mention her comment about his wand, and reminded herself to further pursue that line of questioning later. “Or are you implying that only wizards can do anything worthwhile, when you’re a muggle-born, yourself?”

She frowned. “That’s not what I meant-”

“That’s exactly what you meant,” he interrupted her. “You want to know why I’m wasting my intelligence and magic in the muggle military.”

“Well, the American Marines aren’t really known for their intelligence, are they?” Hermione retorted.

“Neither are muggles, or muggle-borns,” he replied lazily, leaning back against the wall, his arms and legs crossed casually. She hated that it made him look like he belonged on a magazine cover. “And we all know generalized stereotypes are true, don’t we?” The little—only slightly malicious—smile on his lips made him look almost like he was enjoying himself.

"Ugh," Hermione threw her head back and banged it against the wall of the lift. "You are infuriating, you know that?" She banged her head once more for emphasis.

"Oh, really?" he purred, "Do tell me more."

She held up her hand. "No, none of that, thank you." He looked briefly surprised. "I'll not have you reducing this to a battle of innuendo just because I'm a woman and it's the least common denominator."

His surprise changed to startlement, and then he laughed. It was a short, sharp laugh, but it sounded real. "It's not because you're a woman," he said frankly, "it's because it gets to you. Always has."

"I don't know if that's admirable or despicable," she said flatly.

"Oh, stop being such a prude," he told her, waving away her comment. "I'd say the same to the Weasel, so long as no Major Generals were lurking about."

"And that!" Hermione jumped on his point, "the institutionalized homophobia! How can you possibly deal with that?"

"By not being a dick?" He asked blankly, not seeming to understand the question.

"Having to hide your relationships and sneak around, and risk jail time just for being in love-" she ranted.

"Granger," he interrupted her again. This was becoming an annoying habit of his, "I'm not gay."

"But Blaise said-" he interrupted her again.

"Gossiping about me were you? But—and I don't see why it matters to you—yes, while I am attracted to the occasional man, I am mostly attracted to women. How about you, Granger? What are your sexual preferences?" She flushed and didn't say anything. "Come now," he chided mockingly, "you can't argue it's none of my business, or that I'm being a bigot or a misogynist, considering you've just asked me about mine and I answered. Fair's fair, Granger," he sing-songed.

“Brains,” she muttered, her face hot. Major Morris was right, infuriatingly. She would be making his sexuality more important than she had a right to if she refused to answer as well, and she refused to be a hypocrite.

Major Morris cocked his head at her. “Brains? As in the floating brains in the Department of Mysteries? Granger, you are _twisted_ ,” he said admiringly.

She felt like all the blood in her body had relocated to her face. “No! Don’t be stupid, I mean people’s personalities—just people, you- Wait, how do you know about that?” she broke off to accuse.

“You do realize Luna is my cousin,” he looked at her pityingly. “Despite the majority of your friends’ prejudice regarding Slytherins, Luna and I have always got on just fine.” He paused, then added quietly, “we spoke often when she was an involuntary houseguest at the manor. We had a lot in common.”

Hermione looked carefully at his face and decided not to respond to that confession, as much as she wanted to argue the difference between reluctant jailer and reluctant prisoner. He looked disturbingly young in that moment, and rather like he was reliving memories he’d do anything to forget. “Well,” she said brightly, turning to rummage in her bag, “I believe I’ve got a deck of cards in here. Do you think Exploding Snap would hurt this mysterious person who the magic has been affecting?” She looked at the deck in her hand, transfigured into a muggle deck of cards for portability and secrecy, and quickly reconsidered. She remembered the many accidental fires Exploding Snap had caused in the common room, and the combination of accidental fire and this tiny lift would probably end poorly for them. “Right, probably best to not,” she continued, cursing internally as her voice shifted up a register and started sounding frantic, despite her intentions to be smooth and unobtrusive with her subject change. “I’ve got a notebook and pens, we could play Hangman?” she asked weakly.

When she glanced over at Major Morris again, he was back to looking like the blank-faced officer she’d first met in the dining hall not too long ago. He rolled his eyes when she finally brought herself to meet his gaze—maybe not so blank-faced, then.

“I’m not a fragile flower, Granger,” he said sternly, “I can handle a little emotional upheaval with a former nemesis from school. It’s not as if you’re my worst enemy,” he smiled faintly.

“No, that’s Harry,” Hermione retorted, bemused at his civility.

“No, that’s Riddle,” he said, his voice filled with poison when he mentioned Voldemort. “Scarhead wishes he were my worst enemy. He’s just a speccy git whom everyone loves no matter what he does.”

“Voldemort tried to kill him all through school! People only loved Harry when it was convenient for them!” Hermione responded hotly.

“Really?” Major Morris slid down to sit on the lift floor, leaning against the door behind him. “So Dumbledore, McGonagall, you and the Weasel and the Weasel’s ginger horde, you all gave up on him when he fucked up? I don’t seem to remember that. And as for Riddle trying to kill him, that was maybe a few times a year—try living with the sadistic bastard for over a year. Try keeping his attention on you and not your mother or your cousin. Try pretending to love the sick fuck when the noseless freak Crucioed you for every imagined transgression as well as the real ones, and have to pretend to love him so hard him that you almost believed it yourself, because you knew he was slithering about in your head, just waiting for you to slip up so he could punish you for not feeling or thinking how he wanted you to. And then try having everyone hate you while that’s all going on, everyone you thought you could trust instead reviling you and disgusted with you. And try, after it was all over, having the whole world thinking you’re less than dirt and got less than you deserved, spitting on you in the streets and reinforcing how you think, deep down, that they’re right, and you’re disgusting because of what he did to you and what he made you do. And then have a bloody magic tattoo,” his hand moved to rest on the forearm she knew bore the Dark Mark, “that won’t let you forget a single second of any of it whenever you accidentally glance at your arm. You try all that and you get back to me on how your precious Potter’s life was so much harder than mine,” he spat, livid with anger.

Hermione felt like her blood had frozen in her veins. “But,” she ventured cautiously, “I thought that your mother and Luna…” she trailed off.

He sneered. “They thought I loved the bastard, what do you think they thought about me? That I was trying to protect them by keeping his attention on me, or that I was looking out for myself and would do anything to get more power and influence in Riddle’s court? Lucius raised me, remember, and they both knew that. Knew him. Of course they were disgusted with me, hated me, while Riddle was at the manor, even though they both took advantage of a seemingly friendly face to pretend none of it was happening whenever I visited them in their cells.”

Hermione didn’t know what to say. She could try to reassure him that they must know now, at least, that he’d been protecting them, but what was her word worth? How would she know, considering Luna had never mentioned any of this? _Possibly because she knew we wouldn’t be an unbiased audience_ , Hermione realized with chagrin. If Major Morris didn’t believe it himself, he definitely wouldn’t believe her—not without proof, at least.

“Why do you call him Riddle? His name doesn’t have any power anymore; you can say Voldemort,” she changed the subject after an awkward pause.

“Of course his name still has power,” he scoffed. He held up a hand when she opened her mouth to argue. “I don’t mean magical power. He wanted to be known by his ridiculous portmanteau because Riddle was his muggle father’s name. The best way to continue to cut down all he’d created is to refer to him by the name he hated most: Tommy Riddle,” he said simply, calmly. “Calling him Voldemort just reinforces the idea of him as the Dark Lord, not the common psychopath who’d been torturing animals and children since long before he received his Hogwarts letter. Since the war, I’ve been on the front line in a lot of assaults on men who were just like him, the only difference being they had muggle weapons, money, and political power backing them where Riddle had magic and immortality. Relying on fear and notoriety is how warlords—and Riddle—are able to rise to power.”

Hermione thought about what he’d said. “So you’re saying that calling him Voldemort, even after he’s dead and defeated, might make his story attractive to someone in the future? Inspire some child studying the History of Hogwarts to be the next Dark Lord?” she asked skeptically.

“Think of it this way,” Major Morris grinned suddenly and leaned forward, eyes sparkling and his face startlingly bright in the dimly lit lift, “Muggle-born children know Batman, yeah? So every time someone mentions the wizarding supervillain Tommy Riddle, they’ll be picturing him in a bright green suit covered in question marks, telling knock-knock jokes. They’re much less likely to have nightmares about The Riddler coming to kill them with puns than someone who looked like the lovechild of a Wraith and a dementor.”

Hermione couldn’t stop the snorting giggles that exploded out of her, almost like she’d been hit with a super-strength Cheering Charm.

Major Morris settled back against the wall, looking smugly pleased with the world. “Exactly.”

The conversation paused naturally after that, while Hermione caught her breath after her fit of the giggles and Major Morris sat and looked pleased with himself. The silence between them, though, was now much less tense than it had been before.

However, there was only so long Hermione could bear sitting around and doing nothing in total silence, especially since there were no distractions to be had. She supposed she could go over her notes and the offhand comments she’d overheard and try to piece together just who this mysterious woman was that no one was apparently allowed to speak of, and who seemed to communicate telepathically—she had the feeling, though, if Major Morris caught on to what she was doing, he’d confiscate her notes and destroy them in front of her. Better to save that for later, then, when she could work in privacy.

She remembered her mental note from earlier, and broke their detente. “You don’t use magic anymore.”

Major Morris slowly raised a single eyebrow at her. “I do, a bit.”

“But you don’t have a wand?” she asked, confused.

“I do—your speccy friend has it. You realize that that’s theft, yeah?” She hoped he didn’t think she hadn’t noticed his digression, but didn’t steer him back on track quite yet, entertained despite herself. “He stole it off me and has been using it ever since! He’s got a perfectly good wand of his own, you know.”

“Wands aren’t _that_ expensive, why not just buy another?” Hermione argued.

“Maybe because that wand was passed down to me from my Great-Great-Great-Aunt Elladora Black, the dragon tamer?” he asked sarcastically. “You tell me where I can find another family heirloom like that, yeah? Especially one that has all my mother’s brilliant stories about Aunt Elladora attached to it.”

Hermione pulled a face and made a mental note to convince Harry—somehow—to relinquish it. “Yes, alright, you win. But if you don’t have a wand, how can you still do ‘a bit’ of magic?” she asked, making air quotes.

Major Morris settled back against the wall, a wry smile on his face. “You do realize we don’t need wands to do magic, yeah? If we did, how would children be able to perform accidental magic?”

“Wands are a controlling mechanism,” Hermione argued. “Accidental magic is wild, uncontrolled. Wands help us focus it.”

“Focus, precisely,” Major Morris leaned forward again to emphasise his point, his face bright with enthusiasm. “But it turns out—and I didn’t discover this until I came to the States, so don’t worry that the purebloods have been holding back secrets—it turns out that wands are a European affection. A lot more of the American magical tradition came from the indigenous people here than ours did back home. In fact, our wands can probably be traced back to the rune sticks the Vikings used, because the muggle folklore says the Vikings used their rune sticks—more the size of staves than wands—to store their magic. Though I haven’t seen much mention of Vikings in British wand lore, which could mean our wands came from somewhere completely different, or it could just mean European wizards resent being the descendants of Vikings and refuse to acknowledge it.” He’d become animated as he spoke, gesturing decisively to emphasize his points. “And with most of the culture in the Americas being nomadic—up until we colonized the continent and screwed their civilization over—sticks were just one more thing to carry around, and therefore not worth their weight.” This seemed like a topic he’d studied intensively, and Hermione leaned in as well, helplessly intrigued. “So rather than cart around a bunch of wood that would be more useful in the fire, they’d just use a focusing object. Much of the time it was something they kept in a little pouch around their neck—it could be anything; a stone, a bit of bark, a bone, a feather. They didn’t even take it out to use it; they just thought about it while they casted, directing the energy through the object mentally rather than physically. It’s difficult to learn after being indoctrinated into the European tradition of wand-using, but not impossible.”

“What’s yours? May I see it?” Hermione asked, desperately curious. She made a mental note to speak with Flourish and Blotts as soon as she got home. They wouldn’t have anything in stock, but she could see what they had via owl-order on the subject.

Major Morris suddenly seemed to remember who he was talking to, and sat back abruptly. Hermione was left awkwardly leaning into the empty space in the middle of the lift, and slowly leaned back against the wall again.

Despite his suddenly cool demeanor, Major Morris unbuttoned the top few buttons of his uniform’s coat and blouse to fish out his dogtags, which he hung from his fingers towards her but didn’t remove. “I wear them all the time anyway,” he shrugged, and tucked them back in his clothes. He ducked her gaze to focus on buttoning his uniform back up with more attention than the task required.

Hermione found herself reluctantly reassessing Major Morris’s ulterior motives, watching him tuck away his dogtags like they were made of delicate precious metals rather than stainless steel. She didn’t know anything more about focus objects than he’d just told her, but he’d been so enthused on the subject that she couldn’t bring herself to suspect him of making it all up out of whole cloth.

She suddenly remembered that one of the slogans for the American Marines was “band of brothers,” and wondered how that would sound to a man who’d recently been ostracized by his entire family. Lucius had made no secret what he’d thought of his son’s defection from the Dark Lord’s side, not even during his trial, and Major Morris had said himself that he’d believed Narcissa had hated him throughout their ordeal at the Manor. And though Hermione could attest to the truth of the quote that “war is hell,” she also remembered the intense camaraderie it fostered.

It might not even be that the muggle military had changed Major Morris, like she’d thought before. Perhaps instead becoming a Marine had given Major Morris the freedom to become the man he’d always wanted to be. She knew, from watching Harry grow up, how much a difference it made when someone finally realized they could choose their family and weren’t stuck with the one they were related to by blood. Perhaps having an infinite number of “brothers” watching his back—like the Weasleys (and Hermione, and Neville, and Luna) watched Harry’s—had given Major Morris the same confidence and drive as it had Harry.

Major Morris was definitely a different man than the boy she’d known in school, even if he’d begun as that boy. Hermione was surprised to realize that she regretted a bit not having been able to watch the changes happening as he matured, like she had with Harry and Ron after the war. Major Morris was a fascinating stranger, and Hermione wanted to know more.

She decided to begin—even if it was rather late in the game to do so—as she meant to go on. “Major Drake Morris, USMC, I’m Hermione Granger. It’s nice to meet you,” she said, reaching her hand out into the no-man’s-land between them in the small lift. She forced her hand not to tremble, remembering a similar moment she’d heard tell derisive stories about for years, an awkward offer of friendship from one small boy to another. It was a story that she was beginning to see had more than one point of view.

He stared at her in blankly for a long moment, then slowly reached his hand out to grasp hers firmly and shake it once. “The pleasure’s mine,” he said quietly, sounding amazingly sincere.

***

The doors Major Morris had been sitting against suddenly slid open behind him without warning, and he promptly fell backwards into the hall, cracking his head against the floor and sprawling into the hall, half-in and half-out of the lift. Hermione quickly stifled her laugh and occupied herself with switching off her torch and packing it away into her little purse, which had started out life as a beaded bookbag and was bigger on the inside.

“We have _not_ been in here for three days,” Major Morris said in disbelief, staring up at the man standing over him.  

The man looming over Major Morris was someone Hermione hadn’t met yet, though he wasn’t a soldier, judging from the expensive jeans that were decidedly not BDU trousers. _Not a scientist either_ , she thought, as his polo shirt fit well and didn’t have any pithy sayings on it. (She didn’t like to generalize, but some things seemed universal.)

“Tah-dah!” the man announced, ignoring Major Morris’s comment and flinging his arms out like a muggle magician. “Shawn Spencer, here to save the day!” Well, at least that was introductions sorted then.

“Our gratitude for the rescue, Mr. Spencer,” Hermione said, pushing herself to her feet. She dusted off her trousers before offering her hand to Mr. Spencer in greeting, “Hermione Granger, Deputy Prime Minister.”

He shook her hand briefly, told her, “Yes, I know who you are,” with a wink ( _Never heard that before, how original_ , she thought sarcastically.) and moved aside, allowing Major Morris to finish climbing to his feet.

The way Major Morris straightened his uniform and fetched his hat from the corner of the lift reminded Hermione of a startled Crookshanks pretending he’d meant to fall off the wall in the first place, thanks. “Well, Granger- Her- ma’am,” he stumbled over her name, possibly because there was an outside observer and his previous informality wasn’t befitting an officer, “Let’s get you back to your companions and through the ‘Gate back to Earth, shall we?” he asked.

The lights in the lift flickered ominously, and neither Hermione nor Major Morris wasted any time exiting the lift, both of them eyeing the doors suspiciously. “Or not,” Mr. Spencer said slowly, one hand tenderly stroking the wall of the corridor.

 _What an odd man_ , she thought.

“I think they might need to stay on Atlantis for a while. She’s being pretty emphatic,” Mr. Spencer told Major Morris, grimacing apologetically. “But she’s also insisting no one will get hurt,” he added with a shrug.

“Mr. Spencer,” Hermione interrupted him. “Who, exactly, is this woman to whom you all keep mysteriously referring?”

Mr. Spencer opened his mouth to answer, but then quickly snapped it shut at Major Morris’s vigorously gestured ‘no.’ Major Morris turned to eye her. “Nosy,” he muttered.

“Can you really blame me for asking, when you are all being so intriguingly mysterious?” she asked with a shrug, not very bothered by either her attempt at surprising an answer out of Mr. Spencer or Major Morris’s interception of said answer. She’d had to try, at least.

“Whether I can blame you for it doesn’t matter, ma’am,” he flashed a sly grin at her, and her stomach sank slightly. “Whether the Colonel decides to blame you for it does, however.”

Mr. Spencer stepped between them, distracting her from the retort she was about to fire back. “Yeah, okay, calm down guys. I think we really need to get Mrs. Granger-”

“ _Miss_ ,” she interrupted him firmly.

“-whatever—Miss Granger back to her friends, like, soonish,” Mr. Spencer said with a determined calm that made Hermione start to worry.


	18. In which Drake does it all with Class (A's)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Drake does it all with Class (A's) and Shawn shuts this shit down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I looked up many, many things for this chapter, and I just hope my sources contained correct information. One of those things I looked up was the Salem Witches Institute, which I thought was the American school of wizardry but was actually, apparently, an in-joke by JKR regarding the British Women's Institute. On the Potter wiki the American school was unnamed, so I chose a boarding school I thought appropriate :)

MORRIS

 _Miss?_ Drake wondered, even as he fell in behind Shawn to escort Granger wherever Shawn was leading her. Drake would have sworn that Granger and the Weasel would end up married right out of school, with the way they’d always been rowing or snogging in the corridors. _Not that it's really any of my concern._

“Where are Harry and Blaise, then?” Granger asked Shawn, trotting a little to catch up with him.

Drake sped up as well. Shawn just kept picking up the pace, until he was walking fast enough that most other people would have switched to a jog already. Drake didn’t think Shawn knew that he kept speeding up, which was worrying—it meant it was likely Atlantis’s urgency that was motivating Shawn’s speed. The Sheppards’ and Shawn Spencer’s connections to Atlantis were more powerful than anything Drake had ever seen before, including the way that Riddle had imposed his will on his followers through their Dark Marks. Drake absentmindedly rubbed at the cloth covering his forearm over the tattoo hidden beneath another tattoo.

The way Atlantis affected those three during emergencies was almost like a mild form of Imperious. Luckily for them all Atlantis was benevolent. Drake just hoped that what she thought was best for everyone on Atlantis wouldn’t eventually hurt people elsewhere in Pegasus or back on Earth. She caressed his mind briefly, reassuring him, and Shawn slowed slightly.

“What? Sorry—they’re up here somewhere, don’t worry. We just need to swing by the Jumper bay and grab Jesse and Radek; I need to talk to Lorne.” He glanced over at Drake meaningfully. “This is going to get ridiculous soon if we don’t tell them—we need to tell them.”

“Is that what you’re looking for Colonel Lorne for, then?” Drake asked dubiously. “As acting military commander he does have the authority, but Colonel Sheppard won’t like it.”

“Then big brother shouldn’t be napping on the job,” Shawn snapped. He shook his head. “Sorry. But seriously! We got yanked back from Earth with three whole days of leave left, and it’s fucking annoying, especially since I’m just the backup genes and don’t actually have any authority to get anything done!” Shawn complained, his voice growing louder and more annoyed the longer he spoke.

“I’m sorry,” Granger interrupted, walking closer to Shawn and ducking a emphatic arm gesture, “did you just imply that Colonel Sheppard is your brother? His file didn’t say anything about any brothers other than Dave Sheppard.”

Shawn grimaced. “Right. Yeah, uh—that might actually be a secret, sorry. Don’t tell anyone?”

Drake groaned. “I understand now why Doctor McKay was screaming about NDAs earlier. Did you manage to leak the whole program to all of California while you were on Earth?”

“Just the criminal underbelly,” Shawn retorted brightly and—Drake fervently hoped—sarcastically.

“We’re here!” Shawn announced, swinging abruptly through a doorway. The Jumper bay was on an entirely different floor from the labs, and they hadn’t taken any transporters or stairs while they were following Shawn—but they were indeed in the Jumper bay, coming in on a third floor catwalk and following as Shawn scurried down a maze of stairs and ladders to reach the bay floor.

Drake resolved to pump Shawn about the back corridors of Atlantis as soon as things calmed down. This was deeply useful information, and Drake wanted it.

Drake glanced over at Granger when he hit the bay floor, and saw that she was flushed and slightly sweaty from the brisk walk and the speedy climb down three of Atlantis’s high-ceilinged levels, but grinning widely. She noticed him looking and briefly directed her grin at him. “I’ve missed this sort of thing,” she explained succinctly.

Drake guessed there’d been a lot of ‘this sort of thing’ during her adventures fighting Riddle in their early years at Hogwarts, back when everyone had thought Potter was a nutter and before anyone believed Riddle was really back. The thought of Riddle didn’t even sour his mood, since he knew exactly what she meant—Drake’s experiences with similar sorts of things had happened during different wars, but he liked the ‘running around and getting shit done just in the nick of time’ adrenaline rush just as much as she seemed to. “We’ve got a lot of ‘this sort of thing’ around here,” he grinned back at her. Drake didn’t know if he was bragging or empathizing, and found—oddly—that he didn’t care.

“Keep up!” Shawn shouted back at them. He was already halfway across the hanger, heading toward Jumper Two and the small figures of Jesse, Doctor Zelenka, and Colonel Lorne standing beside it. Granger startled and turned to jog after Shawn. As Drake followed in her wake, he wondered just exactly how long they’d spent grinning like idiots at each other.

“...and the closer they get, the more insistent she is that they stay,” Drake heard Shawn tell Colonel Lorne as he and Granger got within earshot. “Pretty sure she wants them to meet, and I think we should go with her on this one; she knows more about it than we do. I’m also getting flashes of the Ancients’ labs and the Iratus bugs along with the Leviathan, and I think that the Ancients might have started out trying to replicate something that these guys have—maybe something like the ATA gene—that lets them interface with the Leviathan. So I think we should give her what she wants, here.”

“Well,” Granger stepped forward, boldly inserting herself into the conversation, “I guess the Wraith would need to get the energy to use from somewhere, which explains the rapid aging of their victims, if they can’t–" Drake touched her shoulder to get her attention and widened his eyes meaningfully when she looked back at him.

“Oh, do they not know?” she asked, bemused. “Well, that’s silly. It’s obviously relevant, and the Statue of Secrecy is eminently unenforceable in a foreign galaxy,” she told Drake severely, and turned back to face the grouping of men (and child) facing her. “Magic is real, and I’m what you call a wizard—well, witch, really, since people must insist on gendered pronouns—and we can manipulate energy and force it to do things that conventional physics dictate are impossible.” She paused, then pointed at Zelenka. “You’re not surprised. Durmstrang?”

“Homeschooled,” Zelenka muttered, avoiding the looks everyone—including Drake—were pinning him with.

“And you,” she turned to look at Jesse appraisingly, “I wouldn’t be surprised if a letter from the Suffield Academy found you in another five years or so. You’re practically glowing with potential.” Jesse preened, and Drake resolved to strike that comment from his mind immediately. Let Shawn or Granger or Zelenka be the one to drop that bomb on Colonel Sheppard; Drake was recusing himself.

“As Major Morris and I were discussing earlier–" she began to explain, sounding like she was standing in front of a classroom. _Thanks ever so for outing me, Granger,_ Drake thought sourly. He returned the stare Colonel Lorne fixed him with, shrugging helplessly. "–Wizarding history gets fairly foggy in the early years,” Granger continued, not noticing Drake’s irritation, “and we don’t have an origin story that’s been passed down the generations like most muggles seem to—muggles are what we call non-wizarding humans—so an extra-galactic origin isn’t actually that far-fetched.”

“The ‘Viathans are from a different dimension,” Jesse corrected, bouncing on his toes to get her attention.

“Extra-dimensional makes even more sense,” she agreed enthusiastically, smiling at Jesse and not talking down to him at all. _And now she’s made a friend for life,_ Drake thought with resignation. _Her eventual departure from Atlantis is going to be a tearjerker, now._

“It’s just amazing that wizards’ extra-dimensionality didn’t result in reproductive isolation of the species,” she enthused. “But early intensive interbreeding with the native muggles millennia ago, when wizard-kind first arrived in this dimension, would even explain the way genetic sports crop up so often among the muggle population—we call them muggle-borns—like me, and like you,” she grinned at Jesse, who grinned back up at her adoringly.

“Like the ATA gene,” Zelenka agreed.

“Your parents were ‘muggles’?” Shawn asked in obvious fascination. Drake could almost see the _Holy shit magic is fucking real what the fuck oh my god!_ just scrolling on a marquee behind his eyes.

“Not a magical bone in their bodies,” Granger agreed. “Though probably a recessive magical gene or two,” she winked at Jesse, before fixing her attention back on Colonel Lorne, staring him down. “Therefore,” Granger put her hands on her hips and said belligerently, “the thing that accidentally hurt _her_ ,” she emphasized, “was magic. And now she—whoever _she_ is—wants me, Harry, and Blaise to stick around and meet the incoming armada of spaceships that caused you to evacuate the rest of my delegation. Wants it enough to trap me and Major Morris for hours in an extremely small—if technologically advanced—lift. I think that means I deserve to meet this woman dictating my life, don’t you?” she asked firmly.

Colonel Lorne closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He shook his head slightly, then looked at Shawn and gave him the nod. Drake noticed that Shawn bounced on his toes when he was excited just like Jesse did. He wondered briefly just who, exactly, had picked that up from who.

Shawn swept his hands out in a grand gesture and said simply, “You’re standing on her,” grinning widely. Drake wondered just how long he’d been holding that in.

“Atlantis is sentient?” Granger asked without disbelief.

“Just like the ‘Viathans!” Jesse agreed brightly, and Granger nodded, visibly absorbing the information.

 _Granger catches on quickly,_ Drake thought approvingly. She hadn’t even spent a second fishing around for more logical explanations than a living, thinking, self-aware city.

She opened her bag and began rummaging around in it before she paused, looking around. “May I?” she asked the air around them, before looking to Shawn for an answer.

Shawn shrugged. “That depends. Will whatever you want to do hurt her or cut her off from us?”

Granger closed her bag again. _She must have been going for her wand,_ Drake realized. He definitely should have reacted to her opening her bag, but he hadn’t even considered the possibility of a threat. That was… probably a problem.

“I don’t think so, but probably better to not, since I wouldn’t have thought our communication spell from earlier would have affected her at all. I’ll have to do some research,” she said, looking thoughtful. “Is she telepathic, then?”

“With me, she’s more empathic than anything, what little I get at least,” Drake answered. “Colonel Sheppard and Mr. Spencer seem to communicate more coherently with her, and Jesse seems to be the one most on her wavelength.”

Colonel Lorne straightened sharply and glared at Drake. “Major, sharing that information is a breach of privacy,” he reprimanded, his voice cold.

Shawn stepped up—unnecessarily—to defend Drake. “Calm down, Colonel. Blame me if you have to, but I think Miss Granger needs to know.”

Drake stood to attention under Colonel Lorne’s angry stare. “Deputy Prime Minister Granger won’t harm anyone with the information, sir. Miss Granger has a need to know in order to prevent accidental damage to Atlantis and the city’s ability to communicate with her people,” Drake reported to his acting commanding officer.

Jesse tugged urgently on Shawn’s sleeve, and Shawn cocked his head in response, listening to something the rest of them couldn’t hear. “Work this out later,” he ordered. Surprisingly, Colonel Lorne seemed to listen, even though Shawn had absolutely no authority in this situation. “The Leviathan are almost here, and we need to find the other two and get them up to speed. Are they with Woolsey? And Teyla. Okay,” he answered himself, heading out of the Jumper bay with Jesse on his heels. Drake, Granger, and Colonel Lorne just watched him go, until Shawn glanced at them over his shoulder. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he yelled, and picked up his pace. They took off running.

“Love the running,” Drake told Granger as they ran to catch up with Shawn and Jesse, grinning.

“Not you, too?” she groaned breathlessly.

“What can I say? It’s a taste of home,” he said, purposefully radiating innocence.

Granger gave him a dark look and pulled ahead, but Drake caught the smile twitching at the corner of her mouth.

***

The five of them bursting through the door at a run—Zelenka had peeled off earlier to monitor the Leviathan’s progress from the ‘Gate room—into the room Mr. Woolsey had been sitting calmly in with Teyla and Potter and Zabini had probably not been the best plan, Drake reflected. At least it had communicated the urgency of the situation admirably, though.

Lorne quickly updated Mr. Woolsey, with Granger breaking in to give a condensed version of the ‘Yes, magic is real, and while I have no actual evidence I suspect the Wraith were the Ancients’ attempt at manufacturing magical ability, and also wizards may actually be aliens from an alternate dimension,’ speech she’d given the rest of them earlier. She glared down Potter and Zabini’s protests at her blatant shattering of the Statute of Secrecy, and they subsided without further argument.

“And why, exactly, aren’t _you_ the muggle Prime Minister?” Drake asked quietly when the attention of the rest of the room had focused on Mr. Woolsey, who was berating Shawn for making decisions that affected Atlantis and her personnel without any actual authority to do so. Drake wasn’t worried; Shawn could hold his own.

“I prefer the details, not the spotlight,” she murmured back with a sly smile. “Too much fancy dress for me, the spotlight, and not enough getting things done.” She jerked her head towards the door inquiringly.

Drake glanced across the room and got the nod from Shawn, Colonel Lorne echoing it a moment later, while Mr. Woolsey remained oblivious to their silent communication. He eased toward the door, Granger right beside him, and smirked at the envious look Potter was shooting their way. Once they’d snuck from the room, Drake wasn’t surprised to find Teyla already outside the door, waiting for them, even though they’d been right next to the door and he hadn’t noticed her leaving before them. She was sneaky like that, a trait that Drake enthusiastically approved of, as it had saved his skin in the field multiple times.

“Rodney requests our presence in the Jumper bay,” Teyla said. She pointed at the radio in her ear in response to Drake’s questioning look. “Encrypted channel. He did not want anyone listening in.”

But Teyla didn’t move.

Before Drake could ask, she nodded at the door and Jesse popped out of the room. “Let’s go!” Jesse whispered urgently, “before Mr. Wooley says I can’t go!” Teyla smiled indulgently at him, and Drake realized she’d been waiting in order to tell Jesse he couldn’t come with them.

Granger seemed to realize it too, and she tabled the issue by grabbing Jesse’s hand. “Argue later, move now!” she said quietly, taking off as the volume of the voices in the room suddenly increased. Drake was beginning to suspect that Jesse might end up proposing to Granger as a ploy to keep her on Atlantis.

As they ran down the corridor, Drake could hear some of Shawn’s argument with Woolsey. “Atlantis invested me with her authority, and so I’m obviously acting on her behalf as her avatar during this shit show! If you don’t like it, maybe you should take it up with–” Shawn’s voice faded as they ran down the corridor and turned into another, dodging the occasional soldier or civilian. (Luckily it was off-hours and the corridors were mostly empty.) Drake really hoped Shawn was talking out of his ass, because the thought of him with all of Atlantis’ might behind him was a little frightening.

***

McKay was doing the preflight check on Jumper Two when Drake, Granger, Teyla, and Jesse all ran into the Jumper bay. “In, in!” McKay chivvied them from the cockpit of the Jumper, jumping out of the pilot’s seat and running into the rear compartment, as if that would make the rest of them move faster. Jumper Two was in its usual spot in the middle of the large hangar bay, so there was really only so fast they could go—despite how surprisingly fast Jesse was on his short little legs.

As their group of four crossed the Jumper bay in a not-at-all surreptitious mad dash, Drake noticed Markham and Stackhouse doing checks on Jumper Five, and motioned them to follow. _The more wizards the better,_ he figured, and he could always explain their presence away as additional support in case something went wrong—especially considering that was exactly what they were. Markham and Stackhouse weren’t fully kitted out for an offworld jaunt, but neither were Drake or Teyla or McKay. At least the two Marines had their sidearms and their magic—which was one more than Drake had, in his dress blues—so if something did go to shit, they’d all have slightly more of a fighting chance, considering they hadn’t had time to swing by the armory or the locker room. Not that Drake expected any of this to go to shit. Not at all.

The seven of them all piled into Jumper Two, and Drake commandeered the pilot’s seat, re-running the preflight checks at top speed. They didn’t have long until someone ordered them to stand down, but like hell was he taking Jesse up out of the atmosphere without a proper preflight conducted by the actual pilot of the craft; Colonel Sheppard would have his bollocks for earrings when he eventually found out.

Teyla was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, trying to talk over McKay to get Zelenka on the radio to give them the ‘Gate room’s permission to take off. She didn’t seem to be having much luck making herself heard, so Drake decided _fuck it._ After Drake finished his preflight, he cut out the middle-man and asked Atlantis to open the iris over the Jumper bay. He’d closed the rear door and taken off before Teyla had the chance to remember their little tagalong, who’d tucked himself away in her blind spot behind the bulkhead separating the cockpit from the rear compartment. Jesse even managed to stay under Teyla’s radar until they hit the stratosphere. The kid might have even made it until they hit the mesosphere and Drake made him come sit in the cockpit and buckle up—but Jesse must have been trying to impress Granger and gotten excited by the topic, because he started speaking loudly enough for the cockpit to hear.

“Jesse Junayd Sheppard,” Teyla said, her voice filled with motherly wrath. (Her ‘mom voice’ was legend in Atlantis, enough so that even Colonel Sheppard cowered when she broke it out.) “What will your father think when he finds out about this?”

“That his spawn has his genes,” Drake heard McKay mutter, and forced himself not to laugh. Instead, he watched the Jumper’s windshield’s heads up display with complete and utter concentration as Jesse barged into the cockpit to argue against being sent back with all the self-righteousness of a tween, for all that he was maybe five and a bit.

“If we go back now, we’ll be ordered to stand down,” Drake interjected when Teyla seemed to be getting to the point where she’d demand Drake turn around and take Jesse back to Atlantis. He understood that Teyla was afraid for Jesse—and that he was practically a second son to her, the way Torren and Jesse were attached at the brain whenever they were in the same place—but honestly, they needed Jesse.

Granger seemed to be on Drake’s wavelength, because she stood to hover in the doorway between the cockpit and rear compartment. “With respect, Ms. Emmagen,” she interrupted Teyla, always a ballsy move, “we need Jesse with us to facilitate this official first contact. He’s the only one who can communicate with both the Leviathan and Atlantis–"

Drake interrupted her, “At least at the distance we’ll be from Atlantis. There’s a few of us who may be able to do both,” he didn’t out Markham and Stackhouse as wizards in this mixed company because he didn’t need to, since McKay had said that the Wraith-Leviathan had been talking in his head, “but Jesse’s always been the best at communicating with Atlantis regardless of distance.” He glanced over his shoulder to find Granger glaring at him. He shrugged insouciantly at her and turned back to watch the HUD.

"–And he’s the only one who has already met the Leviathan.” Granger paused, and added awkwardly, “I know it feels wrong to send children to do things that adults should take responsibility for, but sometimes the children in question are the only ones who can accomplish what needs to be done.”

 _Potter,_ Drake thought with irritation; embarrassingly, a mug shot of Potter popped up on the HUD, with a file detailing everything the SGC knew about Potter scrolling beside it. Drake hastily squashed the feed and concentrated on piloting.

“And the rest of us. You as well,” Granger said softly, probably making no sense at all to the rest of the Jumper’s occupants. Drake remembered teaching himself cabinetry, and forgoing sleep to study magical theory every night under his blankets until he thought his eyes would bleed, and watching Dumbledore fall. He shoved the memories away and checked the HUD—none of it had shown up, thankfully. Granger jumped on his earlier offhand remark, and he gratefully let her voice drown out the memories.

“A few of us?” she asked, and Drake glanced at McKay, thinking only piloting thoughts and refusing to let his fellow Marines even cross his mind.

Granger caught Drake’s glance like he’d intended, and turned to face McKay. “ _You_ are a wizard,” Granger said skeptically.

“I am most definitely not a wizard,” McKay said, sounding startled. “I have no idea what he’s talking about, and I still don’t believe your ‘magic’ isn’t something completely explainable.”

“Yeah—that it’s _magic_ ,” Drake said sarcastically, before reminding McKay, “Remember the Wraith ship, coma, Atlantis, genetic alterations?” Drake glanced at Granger. “He’s not a wizard, but he can probably hear the Leviathan,” he told explained. Honestly, Drake hadn’t even considered it, and he had no idea of the Wraith ship had granted McKay the ability to do magic. If it had, though, Drake figured the forthcoming—probably explosive, knowing McKay—accidental magic would be a good enough indicator that they wouldn’t need to do very many tests.

Granger was probably about to start an argument with Drake about whether or not that meant McKay was a wizard when Drake’s HUD flashed in warning and overflowed with a barrage of alerts.

“Merlin’s balls!” Drake cursed, and slammed the Jumper to a stop. Thankfully, the inertial dampeners meant his passengers didn’t feel a thing. “Merlin,” he repeated himself softly in the dead silence of the Jumper, widening the angle of the viewscreen to try and capture even a fraction of the hull in front of them, let alone the giant spaceships that had just appeared out of nowhere to surround the Jumper. Their stealth capabilities must be exceptional—they hadn’t pinged a single one of his sensors until they’d uncloaked. _That is a fucking awesome tactical advantage,_ Drake thought wistfully, regretting for the first time ever his commitments to Atlantis. What he wouldn’t give to take one of those guys for a spin against the Wraith.

“I guess–" _we’ve arrived,_ he meant to say, but he broke off to clutch his head in unison with McKay, Granger, Stackhouse, and Markham. Their pained groans made an eerie chord that filled the Jumper, but he was too busy trying to sort out the hundreds of cheering voices screaming in his head to notice. He felt like he’d been dropped in the middle of stands at the Quidditch World Cup during the last six seconds without any warning.

In the distance, he heard Teyla frantically asking someone, “Are you well? What is happening?”

Jesse’s voice was as quiet as Teyla’s, but he sounded just fine when he replied, “It’s okay, Radek did this too. The ‘Viathans are just being loud at them.”

 **Shush! You’re hurting them,** Drake heard Jesse’s voice join the cheering crowd inside his head. **They’re old and not used to it; you have to be gentle with them.** Drake was about to muster the energy to retort that they were hurting him far more than he could be hurting them when he realized that Jesse was talking to the Leviathan, not to Drake.

“No, don’t!” he heard Jesse say out loud, alarmed. Drake forced himself to pay attention to the Jumper around him—it was like trying to roll a boulder over the crest of a hill; difficult and almost impossible, until suddenly it was no effort at all—and the hundreds of voices filling his mind, clamoring to be heard, faded to the background murmur of a distant crowd.

Teyla had turned on the subspace communicator and was contacting Atlantis for backup. “We need medical assistance,” she insisted to both Jesse and whoever was on the other end of the connection.

“Zkllidni se, no, they will be fine,” Zelenka replied. “They are all grabbing at heads and groaning, ano? Is just shock of loud people yelling in brains.”

“He’s right,” Drake said roughly, straightening up in the pilot’s seat from his pained slump.

“The ‘Viathans aren’t dangerous, they’re just excited,” Jesse explained to Teyla sourly. “They’ve been alone and hiding from Wraith for so long and now they’ve finally found their friends again, so you should be nice.”

“Should explain this to military on Atlantis and Athosians on mainland,” Zelenka said urgently, commotion in the ‘Gate room coming through as background noise on the Jumper’s overhead speakers. “The Leviathan are close enough to see with naked eyes, but far enough that they look like an armada of Wraith ships. There is much panic and readying of weapons, here.”

Drake guessed he could see that the Leviathan shared a similar silhouette with Wraith ships, but they looked much less… diseased, was the only word he could think of. Different enough to his eyes that they really didn’t resemble the Wraith ships at all—when as close to them as Jumper Two was. Drake requested that the Jumper stream the feed from its HUD and cameras to the monitors in the ‘Gate room, and it complied instantaneously. The background noise from Zelenka’s end quieted considerably, and they could hear him explaining to someone just what, exactly, they were seeing.

Feeling forgotten and slightly relieved by it, Drake stared at the HUD superimposed on the giant hull of the Leviathan they were facing, as did Teyla, though Jesse seemed to be back to talking to the Leviathan filling his head. There were so many of them; 176 Leviathan were surrounding the Jumper, according to the HUD’s count.

“Oh… Oh my,” Granger’s voice broke the relative silence of the Jumper, and Drake spun the pilot’s chair around to look at her, disconnecting his mind from the HUD after commanding it to keep monitoring. (He didn’t want to risk inadvertently sharing his mental monologue with every monitor in the ‘Gate room like he had done in the Jumper earlier.) When the Leviathan had burst into their minds, she must have collapsed where she’d been standing in the bulkhead doorway between the two compartments. She groaned, then rolled to a sitting position, leaning against the doorjamb and blocking the doorway. It was the best position to see the majority of the Jumper’s interior, Drake had to admit. Even when totally out of it, Granger’s subconscious need to know everything was still in effect.

“They’re amazing,” she marvelled, then came back to herself enough to look around both compartments. “‘A few of us,’ hm?” she quoted Drake sardonically, looking pointedly into the rear, where Markham and Stackhouse were curled together in a doubled fetal position on one of the benches, clutching their skulls.

“Statute of Secrecy,” Drake reminded her under his breath, making shushing motions, conscious of the open connection with Atlantis even though it was quiet at the moment. He pointed to the speakers above them, and then at the HUD, where a flashing notification was informing them “Atlantis Public Address System total override enabled.” Very few of the Jumper’s controls were designed for non-ATA-gene carriers, so Teyla had called for backup in the only fashion she was able—and now all of Atlantis knew about the Leviathan. _Though,_ Drake guessed, _all of them dropping their cloaks at once probably hadn’t helped._ Regardless, all of Atlantis didn’t need to know about wizards quite yet, though he was beginning to suspect that they would soon, if Granger had her way.

Drake quickly cleared his thoughts and reconnected to the Jumper, assuming the presence of the Leviathan in the back of his mind wouldn't interfere with his ability to pilot it, since nothing seemed to have happened when they all started shouting in his head in the first place. Thankfully, he was correct. The first thing he did was switch to a private channel with Zelenka, the Jumper’s subspace communications easily navigating the workaround McKay had installed years ago to interface with the radio in Zelenka’s ear. “There, we’ve got privacy,” he told Granger, and sat back, waiting for her to let him have it. She surprised him, though, and didn’t comment any further on either Markham or Stackhouse, who were groaning their way upright in the rear compartment. Instead, Granger crept forward to hover between the pilot’s and copilot's seats, joining Teyla in staring silently out at the Leviathan around them with something approaching awe.

Drake shrugged mentally. Alright then. “Alright there, Marky, Stacks?” he called back to the rear compartment, louder than was probably necessary.

“With respect, sir, you’re a dick,” Markham replied at a much lower volume.

“Feels like that time my sister threw me a surprise birthday party in June, the day I got home on leave from an active combat zone,” Stackhouse groaned.

“Your birthday’s in December,” Markham commented; as always, he was the perfect straight man in their duo.

“That was the surprise part,” Stackhouse said wryly. “Shit myself and nearly leveled my parents’ house, though, so she hasn’t done it since.”

Drake stopped worrying about his two wizarding Marines. They were fine, then, if they were able to jump right into their double act. “Little ears,” he just reminded them, as a nod to Jesse’s presence, before turning to watch McKay. McKay still hadn’t managed to partition away the Leviathan inside his head, and Drake started to worry. He would have expected McKay’s giant brain to be the first to figure out how to work around the presences in his head—maybe Atlantis’ fix to the Wraith ship’s alterations to his genetic code hadn’t gone as smoothly as they’d all assumed. _Shit, this is my fault,_ Drake cursed.

 **Not your fault,** someone boomed inside his head, and Drake winced, clutching his skull. **One of the insane ones attempted forbidden experimentation without applying proper procedures,** the voice continued much more quietly, with an apologetic air, **and no longer had the facilities to foresee the inevitable corruption of the procedure by the Taint infecting it. We regret the harm to this one and would see him repaired.**

 **Can you make it so he can keep talking to you?** Drake recognized Jesse’s voice in his head again, even though he could see that Jesse had crept back into the rear compartment and was talking animatedly with Markham and Stackhouse. He should probably be worried about that, but Drake had other things on his mind at the moment.

 **We can make the attempt, but know that the experimentation has never been successful, which is why it was forbidden,** the booming Leviathan warned. **If the attempt fails, we shall remove the corruption completely and repair him to his original genetic specifications, something we should have no trouble achieving.**

 **He’d like that, thanks,** Jesse replied, his mental tone effervescing with happiness. **Thank you for promising to try to keep him like us.**

 _No he wouldn’t_ , Drake thought privately, or at least what he hoped was privately, _Not if he has to go back to his original ‘genetic specifications’—he’d have to take the gene therapy again._

 **Bring him into me, and place him in my growth chamber** , the Leviathan requested. Extremely conscious of the small child lingering in his brain, Drake refused to even think the dirty remark that comment warranted. He hoped that once he got the hang of the Leviathan’s particular form of telepathy, keeping things private wouldn’t be such an effort. Policing his thoughts was hard work, and reminded him of a time he’d much rather wipe from his memory completely.

“Something’s wrong with Rod– McKay,” it was hard to think of him by last name when every mental reference to him from the Leviathan and Jesse contained so much detail and affection, respectively, “and we need to take him onto one of the Leviathan. It’s going to try to fix what the Wraith ship and Atlantis did to him,” Drake shared with the class, turning back to face the HUD.

Zelenka immediately initiated a video conference with the Jumper, and they saw him sharing the webcam from one of the monitors in the ‘Gate room with Colonel Lorne and Shawn Spencer. Drake wondered where Woolsey was.

“Colonel Sheppard won’t like it,” Colonel Lorne warned, “handing over one of our people to an unknown, even if they are a possible ally, but I agree it needs to be done.” Colonel Lorne was staring intently past Drake, and Drake realized they could see Rodney—McKay—over his shoulder. (He needed to get a hold on this before he slipped up out loud. Colonel Sheppard already wasn’t Drake’s biggest fan, what with Drake replacing him on AR-1 and leading them in the field, so Drake really didn’t want to instigate a jealous snit and ramp up the hostilities.)

“Big brother is just going to have to deal,” Shawn said firmly.

“You should do this,” Zelenka agreed. “Carson does not have the ability to fix McKay, and has been worried that there may yet be side effects Atlantis has not anticipated.”

“You mean besides stabbing him with her wiring every couple weeks?” Shawn muttered, looking guiltily away from the camera. Drake remembered suddenly that it was Shawn and Jesse who’d brought McKay out of the coma in the first place, following instructions from Atlantis.

“We’re agreed then,” Drake confirmed. “Ending transmission now, we’ll contact you again on the way back to Atlantis.”

“Make sure you don’t let the pipsqueak let you forget him in the Leviathan,” Shawn said quickly, right before Drake cut the feed.

Drake didn’t want to die as soon as Colonel Sheppard woke up, so no, he would not be forgetting Jesse in the sentient alien spaceship. Just in case, he wondered if he could come up with a legitimate excuse allowing him to tether the kid to one of the Marines.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Czech, 'zklidne se' is calm down, and 'ano' is yes.


	19. In which breaking the rules has consequences, even if it was the right thing to do at the time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doing things because they're right even if they're against the rules is admirable because the heroes know they will still face the consequences but don't back down, not because everyone agrees with them after the fact and there aren't any consequences (Shawn, pay attention).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have officially surpassed Full Circle's word count. Tragically, I don't think I'm anywhere near the end yet—there's still a lot left to go. Or maybe not tragically, I don't know.

JOHN

John woke up panting, sweating, and struggling, his fight-or-flight response taking over his body and thrashing wildly in an effort to escape the pinning hands holding him down.

“Calm down, John!” he heard Carson’s voice order him from a distance. Was Carson’s ghost haunting him? Did he have to deal with ghosts now too, Pegasus, really? “You’ll not be of any use today if you fall off the bed and break your other leg,” Carson’s ghost muttered, closer now. “Jesse needs you. Come on, John.” The thought of _Jesse_ hit John like a slap to the face, and the fog of painkillers receded a little from his brain.

John stilled, and the hands pinning him to the bed let go. He blinked up at Carson—not a ghost, a clone, John remembered, and was glad he hadn’t said anything—and put a hand up to touch his still-stinging cheek. It was warm; a real slap then.

“Jesse?” he demanded, his voice hoarse and slurred with sleep, and John wondered how long he’d actually been out. Carson didn’t immediately rush to explain that Jesse was fine. Oddly enough, that reassured John that his son was alive and unhurt—if probably getting up to mischief. If Carson had woken John up from his painkiller-induced nap and immediately told him Jesse was fine, John would have wondered why and wouldn’t have believed anything Carson said, thanks to the myriad wonders of ‘Dad brain.’

John’s heart was still racing like it was working toward a heart attack, and he clutched his chest with a groan. “What the fuck did you do to me, Carson? My chest feels like it’s going to explode,” he asked, and froze with guilt when he remembered Carson 1.0’s gruesome death by exploding tumor.

“Just a little shot of adrenaline to bring you out of it,” Carson said cheerily, patting John heavily on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine. A little woozy, perhaps, once it wears off and the painkillers overwhelm you again. I would have let them wear off naturally, but Jesse, well…”

“What’s he done now?” John groaned, covering his eyes. There was something niggling at his memory, something about Jesse, but the memory was blurred with painkillers and foggy when he tried to reach for it. His son had been causing trouble, like usual, and something involving Atlantis’ public address system?

“Well, he’s refusing to come off the Leviathan,” Carson explained. “He says he wants to stay for as long as it takes to fix Rodney, and Major Morris isn’t having it—and rightfully so—but Jesse’s hidden himself on the ship and won’t come out. The Leviathan doesn’t understand what the problem is, and Jesse’s managed to convince it that there isn’t one, and as he’s better at communicating with it than the adults are, they’re having trouble getting their point across. So, we need you to convince your son to come back to Atlantis,” Carson finished, looking exasperated.

John was silent for a moment after Carson stopped speaking, because his blood had frozen in his veins. He could actually _feel_ the shock coursing through his body. “What?” he asked numbly, and waved Carson off when he started to repeat himself. “Get me a radio,” he said tonelessly.

One of the hovering nurses immediately passed one over, and John jammed it into place, asking Atlantis to pretty please connect him to his wayward son—and the rest of the people out there with him in _space_ with the _alien spaceships_ who’d come to visit.

“Jesse Junayd Sheppard!” he thundered into the radio as soon as Atlantis had complied quickly and quietly. _Oh, you’re in trouble too,_ he thought at her, _I know you must have had something to do with this._ “You get your ass back to Atlantis _right the fuck now,_ you are in _so much trouble,_ ” John ordered.

“But Dad,” he heard Jesse start belligerently, and overrode him.

“Don’t you argue with me,” John said angrily. “You are a certifiable genius, son, so I know you can figure out why I’m upset. You listen to Major Morris and get back on the Jumper right now. You can think about what you’ve done on the way home, and when you get here you come find me right away and tell me, you got it?”

“Okay, Daddy,” Jesse agreed, voice trembling.

“I love you, baby; you scared me,” John comforted him, voice softening.

“Love you too, Daddy,” Jesse said quietly.

“Got him,” Major Morris’s voice broke in. “Boarding the Jumper and heading back to Atlantis now, sir.”

“And the rest of you,” John told the Major coldly, “I want to see you, too. What were you even thinking? Don’t answer that,” he ordered, hearing someone taking a breath over the radio. “You all might not be as young or as smart as my son, but you can also spend the way back thinking about what you’ve done. I’ll be looking forward to hearing all of your excuses when I’m done with Jesse.” He clicked off the channel as soon as he’d finished speaking and tossed the radio on the gurney.

John covered his face with his hands. “What even?” he asked the air mournfully, and scrubbed at his face, pulling himself together. Carson was eyeing him when John dropped his hands.

“That was a little harsh,” Carson chided, and John shook his head.

“I’ll be fair, but honestly, what were they thinking?” John wondered rhetorically, amazed at the jumps in logic that had made _that_ all seem like the best course of action. He waved Carson quiet when it looked like he was going to reply. “Can I get out of bed? I’d rather not do this in the infirmary if I don’t have to.”

Carson looked at him critically. “You try and stand up on your own and you’ll get two steps before you fall over,” he said. “Not to mention you need to be monitored until the adrenaline and painkillers work their way out of your system. You’ll not be going anywhere.”

“Not even into uniform and sitting quietly in a chair in my office?” John pleaded. “I can’t effectively yell at them from a hospital bed in pink scrubs,” he complained, breaking out the puppy-dog eyes.

Carson sighed with audible capulation. “Only if I’m there to supervise and monitor your status.”

“Awesome,” John said, happy to have things going his way for once in this fucked up day, that was already about fifteen minutes too long. “You’ll probably need to know everything anyway, since I doubt this is going to be the end of it.”

With a resigned expression, Carson started checking and detaching the leads hooked up to John. John ignored him and grabbed for the radio tangled in his sheets, fitting it back over his ear. _Colonel Lorne,_ he requested from Atlantis, and she complied with a burst of put-upon irritation. _I love you too,_ he soothed her, _even if I’m still angry. I know you did what you thought was right, even though I don’t like it._ She sent him a wave of smug love. _Doesn’t mean I’m not still mad,_ he added, and the emotion swelled before softening apologetically. The radio connected, and he ordered Colonel Lorne to come to the infirmary—after stopping by John’s quarters to grab his BDUs. John assumed his dress blues had gone the way of most patients’ clothes once they hit the infirmary, which was ‘removed with prejudice by shear-happy nurses.’ He’d most likely have to requisition a new set, and John just hoped Carson or one of the orderlies had bagged up the pieces rather than tossing them. Replacing the chest candy was always a hassle.

***

It turned out the wheelchair was non-negotiable, since Carson was right, and even standing up to finish pulling on his BDU pants almost made John topple over. He argued for argument’s sake, but let Carson win the fight quickly—with the conditions that Carson would only take the least-trafficked hallways and that the wheelchair would be hidden somewhere outside of the room during the debriefings. Disciplining his people wouldn’t be as effective if the wheelchair was right in their faces, reminding them that John wasn’t at top form, he reasoned.

A glance at the paper city covering John’s desk had led to a quick relocation to the conference room, and John forewent the head of the table to settle in on the side of the long table opposite the door, Carson to his right in order to make sure John didn’t keel over for some preventable medical reason. John chose the long side of the table because he wanted to be able to lean in and get in someone’s face if he had to, without the drama of standing.

Switching to the office chair from the wheelchair made his leg scream, but he kept himself from grimacing until Carson left the room to stash the wheelchair somewhere, just in case Carson reconsidered the whole thing and dragged John right back to the infirmary.

He had composed himself by the time Carson returned, and they settled in to wait—John for the pain in his leg to subside, and Carson for John to slip up and let it show. John distracted himself from his leg by mentally reviewing the bare-bones briefing Colonel Lorne had given him along with John’s BDUs.

It also gave him time to recover from his initial instinctive response of, _Jesus Christ. When it rain in Pegasus, it not only pours, it pours buckets of acid all over a cherry Ferrari._ Lorne had skipped most of the details, but had told John he’d have a full report on his desk in a few hours. John suspected some of the details Lorne had left out were so John would be exhausted from the other debriefings before he got to Lorne’s part in it, and would no longer care enough to deliver a thorough ass-chewing, but he’d deal with that later.

After a few minutes, the pain in John’s leg subsided enough that he was bored waiting for his prodigal son (and company) to return. He decided he might as well get started, and asked Atlantis to tell Shawn Spencer to come see him.

Shawn popped through the door almost immediately, his shadow—Corporal Spencer—looming in the hallway a few steps behind him. John waved for Shawn to take a seat, and then didn’t say anything. John just watched him for a minute, until Shawn started fidgeting and Corporal Spencer’s loom had taken on a distinctively protective air.

“Stand down, Corporal, I’m not going to hurt him,” John said wryly. Corporal Spencer settled, though not into parade rest, instead leaning against the wall of the conference room with his arms casually crossed over his chest, reminding John that Corporal Spencer’s considerable skills hadn’t been under the military’s purview for quite a while.

John focused back on Shawn. “Avatar of Atlantis?” he asked simply, letting a single eyebrow crawl slowly up to his hairline.

Shawn shrugged, not defensive—not yet. “One, I have no authority on Atlantis,” he held up a loose fist, fingers rising as he ticked off his points. “Two, I needed authority to manage the situation because Woolsey was doing fuck all. C, it sounds really cool. Four, no one was listening to me because not only do I have no authority, I am actually considered to be less intelligent than most lab equipment by the majority of the civilian contingent, because V,” he glanced at the open palm he was holding up, wiggling his thumb, and then looked back at John, “the asshole half-brother I never knew conscripted me to an alien galaxy and won’t stop blaming me for fucking existing—something I had nothing to do with in the first place—and refuses to publicly acknowledge me as anything more than convenient childcare, because it makes him have feelings.”

A little righteous wrath started filling Shawn’s tone as he closed his fist and started over, with the middle finger this time, “And number Fuck You, did I mention that because you were napping on the job after stupidly pushing yourself too far for no good reason, I got pulled off leave to come take care of shit the _day_ after I got engaged and had a houseful of uninvited guests and while I was _in the middle of intimate relations with my fiancé_?” he crossed his arms and settled back in his chair, seething with visible rage and glaring across the table at John.

John found himself on the defensive, and stopped himself before he said anything in response. He… maybe needed to re-evaluate a few things in his relationship with Shawn. “Understood,” he finally made himself say calmly. “But even if you were conscripted, you agreed that it was the best course of action, and it was done to protect you.” John leaned forward and continued, “Either way, you receive a paycheck from the SGC, and therefore you are a civilian employed by this base—so you need to have a little fucking respect for the commanding officer of the base you’re on during formal debriefings, even if the officer in question is your asshole half-brother. You and I can discuss the other points you raised at another time, in private,” he refused to glance over at Carson or flush with embarrassment, even though having Carson hear Shawn call John out on being a dick who’s bad with people made John want to die a little, “but right now I need you to tell me why you effectively mutinied during a crisis situation and took control of the city out from under Mr. Woolsey.”

The rage visible in Shawn disappeared disconcertingly quickly. John glanced at Corporal Spencer, who just smirked at him. John prayed for patience, and Atlantis came through for him, sweeping him with a calming wave of emotion, like a mental dunk in a cool trough on a sweltering day.

“I didn’t take control of the city from Woolsey,” Shawn explained, “though I guess I might have mutinied a little, if you can call arguing till they give in mutinying.” Shawn paused with a curious look on his face and worked his mouth for a moment before saying “Mutiny,” one more time, then continued on like nothing strange had happened. “Easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and all that, and I eventually got him to see things my way.”

“That sounds disconcertingly like a euphemism for torture,” Carson muttered.

“He doesn’t stop talking until you see things his way, so it kinda is,” Corporal Spencer commented, shrugging. Shawn shot him a startled and upset look over his shoulder, and Corporal Spencer smiled reassuringly at him. Shawn turned back to look at John, but it took him a moment to wipe the worry from his face. John wondered if there was trouble in paradise again—so quickly, too, after everything had apparently been resolved on leave. He wondered guiltily if Pegasus and its complementary neverending shitshow was to blame.

“Okay,” John said slowly, regrouping. “I’ll probably want to talk to you again after I meet with Woolsey, but why don’t we make that in a few days. In fact,” he added, warming to the subject, “you’re on enforced leave until then. Get off my city, both of you—I honestly don’t care if it’s to Earth or the mainland—and I’ll see you in a few days. Make it four days,” he added, feeling generous. “Dismissed,” he ordered, and waited for them to leave.

Once the door to the conference room had closed behind their bemused backs, he let his head fall forward until it rested gently against the cool surface of the conference room table. “I am so fucking glad I am not in a relationship right now,” he told it, “that shit is exhausting.”

Carson made a surprised sound. “I thought you and Rodney had worked things out,” he said, sounding puzzled.

John raised his head from the table to look at Carson, confused. More than half his mind was still working over what the hell he was going to do with Shawn when his four-day grace period was up. “Yeah, of course. Me and Rodney are fine,” he said slowly. Maybe he could see if Woolsey would take Shawn on as a sort of pro-forma second in command. That would let Shawn have the authority to refuse orders from the scientists, at least, if he was truly being taken advantage of as much as it what he’d said had implied.

“Just because he’s in a coma again doesn’t mean you’re a free man, Colonel,” Carson said hotly.

John eyed the incensed doctor warily, Carson’s tone cluing him in that he was in trouble for some reason. Again. “What do you mean– Coma?!” he broke off to exclaim, finally tuning in completely to the conversation.

“Aye,” Carson agreed as the conference room door cracked open. “The Leviathan put him into a medically induced coma as a part of the process to restructure his genetic code.”

“I didn’t see him in the infirmary, where–” John broke off as his son stepped up to the other side of the table and clambered into one of the chairs. The Jumper must have gotten back to Atlantis while he was meeting with Shawn.

“He’s still on the boss ‘Viathan, Daddy,” Jesse said cautiously.

“Colonel Lorne and I both informed you,” Carson agreed.

“I didn’t–” John shook his head. “How long?”

“Boss ‘Viathan didn’t know,” Jesse answered timidly. “Until it’s done, he said.”

Carson shrugged agreement. John realized this was out of both of their realms of knowledge, and forced himself to drop the subject—for now. “Get over here,” he told Jesse tiredly, not liking this new reticence his son was exhibiting, even if it was warranted. “Give your old man a hug.”

Jesse clambered over the table to wrap his arms around John’s neck rather than taking the traditional route—exiting chair and rounding table—most other people would have chosen. “You scared me to death, you know,” he told Jesse’s hair softly, his heart clenching in his chest as his son tried to smother him. He wrapped his arms around Jesse and squeezed him back just as tightly, and Jesse rubbed his face into John’s shoulder. John hoped his son wasn't crying—not because boys weren't allowed to cry ( _Fuck you, Dad_ ), but because he didn't want to face the rest of the debriefings with snot on his shoulder—and patted Jesse's back comfortingly, holding on long past the time when Jesse started fidgeting in his embrace, bored now with his dad’s emotional breakdown.

Eventually, John forced himself to let go of his wriggling child, who scrambled over the table and back into the chair, where Jesse squirmed around until he was sitting on his knees, in order see over the table.

John took a couple seconds to collect himself, and said firmly, "Now, tell me what you did, why it was wrong, why you think I'm angry, and what you think your punishment should be." Sometimes the punishments Jesse came up with were fitting, and sometimes they were along the lines of being made to ’eat all the ice cream in the world' (obviously, John overrode the latter type). When Laura was pregnant, she had always said that she’d thought if her parents had paid more attention to _what_ she'd done wrong and why she’d done it, rather than whether it was wrong in the first place, she wouldn't have gotten in trouble for trouble's sake quite so often. This system John and Jesse had worked out over the years was John’s way of honoring her, because even though she'd never gotten to meet their son, this way, she still got to have a hand in raising him. Most of the time, John even remembered to use the system. (Rodney thought it was bullshit and deplorably new-age, but Rodney's parents had just ignored him and Jeannie and left them to raise themselves, so John just ignored him. Especially since Rodney was usually the only one—out of all John's friends, and despite Rodney’s complaints—who actually utilized the system when Jesse did something wrong.)

"Well," Jesse hedged, then took a deep breath and dove in. "I took Radek to see the ‘Viathans even though he didn’t want to go and then I didn’t ‘zactly tell them what Rodney told me to when he asked me to make them stay where they were because they were _so_ sad and so _lonely_ and they just wanted their friends back, and–" he said in a single breath, and paused to gasp for air before continuing, "–and Miss Granger—who says I can call her that or Hermy because Her-my-oh-nee” he slowed down to sound it out carefully, “is kinda hard—agreed that because the ‘Viathans came from a different dimension wizards are also probably from a different dimension and are the friends the ‘Viathans are looking for so they were going to go see them but then Mr. Wooley,” he paused to gasp for air again, “was taking so long to listen that they listened to Rodney instead who said ‘go now anyway,’ and I hid on the Jumper and went too because they needed me, and then Teyla noticed and said no and Miss Granger and Major Drake said I was the only one who knew the ‘Viathans and they needed me and then the ‘Viathans dropped their clothes–”

 _Cloaks,_ John interpreted, amused despite himself by Jesse’s dramatic retelling.

“–and everyone was hurting in their heads because the ‘Viathans are _loud_ , Daddy, when they all talk at once–” Jesse paused to suck in another breath, “–and I had to tell them to _shush_ and then Major Drake and Miss Granger and Marky and Stacks stopped hurting in their heads but Rodney didn’t, and so the boss ‘Viathan said to put Rodney on him and he’d try to fix what the sick ship did and what ‘Lantis did to help because the boss ‘Viathan could fix it all the way like ‘Lantis couldn’t,” Jesse finished, cheeks pink and panting for air, his eyes bright with the adventure he’d just relived.

Atlantis’s patch on his genetic code had been a Hail Mary, and John knew her well enough to know that she still wasn’t entirely confident that it would stick. So now Rodney was trapped on an alien spaceship being experimented on by alien spaceships, and John couldn’t even go rescue him even if he was physically able to, because it sounded like this was the best chance Rodney had. He forced that back, and concentrated on the bright-eyed boy in front of him, rather than the bright-eyed man in a coma on a sentient ship in geosynchronous orbit over Atlantis.

John prompted Jesse to continue, “And why was it wrong to not tell the Leviathan what Rodney asked you to say, and to sneak onto the Jumper?”

“Because… The ‘Viathan disobeyed but didn’t know they were disobeying, because they didn’t know what they were supposed to do?” Jesse asked. John nodded and waited for him to keep going. “Aaaand it was bad to sneak onto the Jumper because if something had happened and they didn’t know I was there I could have gotten hurt. And the Wraith could have got the ‘Viathans and me and the rest of us and learned how to talk to them properly or make us do it for them? And that would be bad.”

John shoved down the terror running through him that that notion—something he hadn’t even considered—prompted. “Right,” he agreed, grateful his voice didn’t waver. “And why does that make me mad?”

“Because then you’d lose me and Rodney and Major Drake and Teyla and everyone, just like Mom, and you’d be alone and sad and you don’t like to be alone,” Jesse said sadly.

John rubbed his suspiciously blurry eyes. That was more insight into his psyche than he really wanted his son to have to have—or to share with the suspiciously quiet Carson sitting beside him. “Yes,” he said quietly, pushing Carson from his mind. “If I lost you like I lost your mom, I think it’d kill me,” he told his son seriously. He wished he could be gentler about it, maybe soften the truth a little, but Jesse was too much like John in the risk-taking department for that to do any good.

He forced the fear of losing Jesse—and everyone else he loved, in one fell swoop—to the back of his mind, gratefully accepting Atlantis’ wave of comfort. She was remarkably present in his mind today, perhaps afraid of taking him for granted after being cut off earlier like she’d been. “And what do you think your punishment should be, so you won’t do something like this again?”

“Not being allowed to study magic with Miss Granger or learn more about the ‘Viathan till I’m super old,” Jesse said glumly.

“Well, that’s certainly,” John paused, looking for the right word, and not letting himself laugh that his son’s idea of punishment was not being allowed to study—when John was his age, he’d thought lessons _were_ the punishment—”a fitting, and, uh, creative idea. But maybe instead, you can do those things–” Jesse brightened up considerably. “—while you’re grounded. No visiting the mainland, no seeing Torren outside of lessons,” Jesse wilted again, giving John a pathetic look.

“No Torren at _all? Ever?_ ” he asked dramatically.

There was nothing amusing about this. John didn’t smile. “Not outside of lessons until you’re done being grounded, no.” He’d warn Jesse that he had to pay attention to his lessons and not Torren during his ‘school’ hours—if Jesse were a different kid entirely, one who’d even contemplate the thought in the first place.

“How _long?_ ” Jesse whined, sounding truly five for the first time since he’d stepped into the room.

“A month,” John answered firmly. “More, if you argue.”

“Even Sundays?” Jesse asked, sounding hopeful.

Sundays were rare enough that John thought for a moment. “We’ll discuss it if there’s a Sunday. It depends on if you’re good, though.”

“Like Santa,” Jesse grumbled, and John laughed wryly.

“Like Santa,” John agreed. “Now skooch. Stay in the apartment until I tell you that you can leave. I want you to write down everything you know about the Leviathan for me in your neatest handwriting, as well as everything we just talked about here, okay?”

Jesse nodded grumpily and slid out of his chair. “Hate stupid mission reports,” John heard him grumble on his way out the door, and that was apparently the last straw for Carson, who burst out laughing.

“So who’s won yet, you or Rodney?” Carson asked, still laughing. “Is he going to be a soldier or a scientist?”

“Whatever he wants,” John shrugged, deciding not to ask what Carson meant, since he thought he’d spotted Major Morris hovering outside the door with that scarily efficient aide to the British Prime Minister. “Knowing him, he’ll probably invent something entirely new to be,” he said absentmindedly, and waved Morris and what's-her-name into the conference room. His leg was starting to holler for attention, but he ignored it. He was sitting down, still, so there was nothing to worry about.

“Major Morris, Miss…” he trailed off so she would introduce herself, and indicated that they seat themselves.

“Deputy Prime Minister Hermione Granger,” she introduced herself, hovering awkwardly before taking her seat as she obviously debated with herself about the etiquette of forcing him to stand and shake her hand or the rudeness of not shaking.

John bit back the, ‘Yes, I know who you are,’ that wanted to pop out in response to the combination of her accent and introduction. She gave him a wry look, and he figured she got it a lot. “Miss Granger, the one my son wants to learn about magic from?” he asked instead. Major Morris’s eyes widened slightly.

John was about to ask Major Morris to explain when Miss Granger enthused, “Oh, I’m not surprised. That would be lovely, to work with a mind like his, if I didn’t have other responsibilities waiting for me back home. Perhaps after I’m done with this term in office, we could arrange something? Jesse’s so brilliant, and his magical potential alone—I’m actually quite surprised the Suffield Academy hasn’t contacted you yet. What’s his accidental magic been like, may I ask? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone so strong since– Actually, he might have more power than Harry did when he was a first year, come to think of it,” Miss Granger mused. Major Morris’s blanch, despite his still-expressionless features, made John feel queasy.

“I’m getting the implication, here,” John said slowly, “that you’re talking about more than just studying magic’s effects on the Leviathan.”

“Well, yes,” Miss Granger replied, bemused. “I’m sure your son would want to learn the practical applications as well. America doesn’t seem to be quite as strict on homeschooling, and even if they were, Jesse’s level of power, and his intelligence, would necessitate an exception regardless. He seems the type to figure things out through experimentation, which can be dangerous in magic when working without a solid base of the fundamentals. Think of it like giving an average five-year-old a brick of pure sodium and a swimming pool, and telling them to go play without explaining anything. With Jesse, it’d be like giving him the ability to split the atom and then being surprised if something like Hiroshima happened,” she finished more gravely than she’d begun.

John was speechless. He finally managed to gather himself enough to ask flatly, “So, you’re telling me my son’s a wizard. That he not only has a post-doc’s level of understanding in chemistry, and math, and physics, and engineering, but that there’s a whole new secret field for him to teach himself that turns everything else he knows on its head, and you told him this?”

Granger just looked back at him. “Would you rather I not have?” she asked curiously.

Major Morris, who had been getting paler and paler the longer John spoke, half-stood at the table to say, “Sir, permission to–”

“Yes, go,” John cut him off, clutching at the table weakly. “Don’t let him out of your sight!” John yelled after Major Morris’s receding back, as the Marine bolted out of the room at a dead sprint.

“I take it–” Granger began, and John cut her off.

“What you don’t understand is that Jesse already has the knowledge to split the atom, and with the way Atlantis dotes on him, the ability,” he said dryly, resisting the urge to bang his head on the table until he woke up from this nightmare.

“Excuse me,” Carson said, and John suddenly realized that he’d never brought up the whole ‘magic is real’ thing with Carson.

“Er,” John said.

Carson ignored him, looking at Granger. “Hermione Granger, you said?” She nodded. “Pleasure,” he said, standing to reach across the table and shake her hand. “My youngest sister, Danger, was a Gryffindor. Don’t know if you remember her, but she was in Fred and George Weasley’s year. I believe she’s actually engaged in sorting out a business partnership with George Weasley now—she came by her nickname honestly, and idolized the two of them in school,” he rambled, and John felt like he’d lost control of the situation a long time ago and only just realized. It turned out that Granger did know Carson’s little sister, and the surreality of the situation was overwhelming.

“You’re a wizard too? Is everyone magic?” John asked Carson in despair. He could deal with aliens and another galaxy and wormholes and sentient spaceships—but magic, too? Couldn’t he at least have some time to adjust?

“Oh, no. I’m a squib, me.” Carson explained nonsensically. “Got into genetics to discover why.” He turned back to Granger, “It’s actually really quite enthralling, the arbitrary interactions of the combination of genes that–”

John cut Carson off. “Later. All of this later.” He wanted to get these debriefs over with before Jesse leveled the city. Or the planet. God, like that kid needed more power. “Quickly and concisely, please, tell me what the hell you were thinking with all this,” he ordered Granger.

Granger did, in under five minutes even, though still not as quickly or concisely as John had hoped.

“And now my son’s actually an alien from another dimension,” John summarized when she’d finished, “with a legitimate reason to beg me to let him have a giant sentient alien spaceship rather than a puppy or a pony. This day just keeps getting better and better,” he groaned, no longer caring who heard him complain as if he were his son’s apparent age rather than his mental age.

“No, no, don’t even,” he told her when she started to say something else. “Seriously, I can’t take any more right now. See me tomorrow to talk about it, or something. Speaking of, though,” he realized he couldn’t keep the British delegation on Atlantis for forever, as much as he might like to keep them under his eye at the moment, “the rest of your delegation is free to go back to Earth whenever the SGC can take them. However, while I’m not conscripting you or anything,” he made sure to mention, his conversation with Shawn still sharp in his mind, “I’d appreciate it if you stuck around for a while so my son doesn’t end up the de facto liaison for the Leviathans. You can coordinate with Major Morris or something, just please leave me alone now so I can finish these debriefings.”

Granger left, after giving him a pitying look and finding out when and where she could find Carson to geek out about genes later. “I couldn’t have been any less professional if I’d had Jesse’s snot all over my shoulder, could I?” he asked Carson rhetorically.

“Or doped up in pink scrubs on a gurney in my infirmary,” Carson agreed anyway. “Perhaps that’s enough for today.”

“No, nope, gotta see the magic Marines and Teyla and Woolsey,” John muttered, ignoring the way everything he’d just had dumped on him was beginning to make him feel a little lightheaded. He felt a pinch in his thigh, and looked down to see Carson’s sneaky hand already withdrawing a syringe from John’s leg. “Great,” John said flatly. “Still gonna do it though,” he told Carson stubbornly, because the door was opening to admit Sergeants Markham and Stackhouse.

“Wizards, really?” John asked, before they’d even sat down. The Marines settled into parade rest just inside the door.

“I prefer Shaman, actually,” Stackhouse said.

Markham nodded sagely, and added, “Mage.”

John closed his eyes and prayed for more patience, but it seemed like Atlantis agreed with Carson, because she ignored him. Either that or she was helping Jesse destroy physics. John really hoped that it was the former. “Dismissed,” he told the Marines. He’d think of something to do with them later. Make them report directly to Major Morris, probably, because John ascribed to the military’s habit of rewarding competence and ability with responsibility. As a bonus, it was rare to find someone who liked being loaded down with additional responsibilities, so it was also an effective punishment. See how they all liked being on Leviathan duty. “Report to Major Morris at 0700 tomorrow morning,” he added as they left. There, done. Major Morris’s problem now.

The door opened again and Teyla slipped through. John groaned. “Do not worry, I have taken the liberty of informing Mr. Woolsey that you will speak with him tomorrow. I will also debrief you tomorrow. I am just here now to help you back to your quarters,” Teyla smiled at him. “I assumed you would like to spend the night there rather than in the infirmary with Carson, as much as he would like your company. Major Morris will be staying the night on the couch in your quarters, to make sure any ‘accidental magic’ Jesse may exhibit will be quickly contained.”

“You are a goddess. Are you magic too? How do you know everything?” he asked her, amazed, and immediately turned to Carson. “What the fuck did you give me?” he asked sadly.

Teyla laughed. “I am a mother, that is all. I have requisitioned one of the empty guests’ quarters in order to stay the night on Atlantis so I may speak with you in the morning. After the debrief, I will return to the mainland to spend some time with my family.”

 _Ooooh, Teyla was pissed,_ John thought. “Ooooh, Teyla’s pissed,” John also said. He grimaced. “Seriously, Carson, what did I ever do to you?”

Carson was snickering at him, and Teyla actually rolled her eyes. “Goodnight, John,” Carson said without answering John’s question, and disappeared through the door, the cruel cruel man.

“You are a cruel, cruel man,” John called after him. He turned to look at Teyla sadly. “Can we take the back corridors? I want to sleep now and have this day be over.”

She laughed at him again, and he couldn’t even blame her for the way it sounded like the auditory lovechild of schadenfreude and pity. “Tory child freudity,” he told her. Teyla just nodded solemnly and manhandled him into the wheelchair she’d produced out of nowhere. He didn’t _think_ she’d come in with it, at least. “Magic,” he told her again solemnly.

Thankfully, the trip back to his quarters was through only empty corridors, and he managed to keep his mouth shut. He just hoped Atlantis didn’t have a way to record their mental conversations, because if so, John would bet she was saving space for this one on a very special, secret server. They should totally have an Atlantis’ Funniest Home Videos movie night. That shit would be hilarious.

Jesse was already in bed for the night and Major Morris was sacked out on the couch—though sometime since John had last seen him, Major Morris had finally found the time to change out of his dress blues into BDUs. Blues, BDUs—John was a poet! And he had noticed that Major Morris’s eyes had been open a little, and he was going to keep an eye on that, that, that Major who babysat his son for him and stopped Jesse from breaking physics.

Teyla calmly agreed and helped John into bed, impersonally stripping him to his underwear and covering him up with the blankets. She even ended with a kiss to his forehead, like he was magically— _magic, ugh_ —a giant, 40-mumble Torren.

***

John woke up to a living room full of Marines, plus one very energetic five year old. The previous day was a little hazy, but he could remember exactly how he’d gotten himself into this—to be fair, though, when John had ordered Sergeants Markham and Stackhouse to report to Major Morris at the crack of dawn, he hadn’t known that Teyla had volunteered Major Morris as John’s (Jesse’s) emergency babysitter, or that he wouldn’t have time to tell Major Morris about it before the special sauce Carson had injected John with turned him into a raving idiot.

The lack of forewarning had, apparently, made Major Morris decide that the Sergeants should join him on ‘Jesse Watch 2012,’ though John suspected keeping it all in John’s apartment might be revenge against John for something Major Morris was holding a grudge about. But, regardless, John relaxed a little when Major Morris updated John, because while his son still had magic— _oh God, save me, please_ —Jesse also hadn’t yet exhibited any accidental magic. John just hoped the inevitable display didn’t involve explosions. Or fire. Or teleportation. Or laser eyes. Or invisibility. He was starting to regret encouraging Jesse’s relatively normal fascination with superheroes. _At least it’s superheroes and not supervillains,_ John comforted himself weakly.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The alternate title of this chapter was "In which everyone talks a whole fucking lot and nothing actually happens."


	20. In which Jesse’s accidental magic becomes apparent

MORRIS

Major Drake Morris’s life had gotten exponentially more difficult in the past few days. His boss had found out about magic, the entirety of wizarding Atlantis was now nominally under his command (including the Sergeant Smartasses Markham and Stackhouse), an armada of friendly sentient spaceships were knocking on his door and one of them was performing the genetic equivalent of open-heart surgery on one of his team who also happened to be his boss’s estranged boyfriend (maybe, Drake still wasn’t sure and none of them really talked about it), his past had come back to haunt him—and even more strangely, befriend him—and now his main objective in life was to be the fire extinguisher to his boss’s son’s inevitable flaming shitshow of accidental magic.

And there was a Leviathan landing on the east pier.

He found himself running after Jesse as the kid dashed down the main corridor to the transporter that would take them to the east pier, because it was his shift on Jesse Watch. He’d made a roster and split the duty five ways, between him, Sergeants Markham and Stackhouse, Zelenka, and Granger, so that Jesse would have someone around him at all times who would be capable of at least shielding the kid and the nearby area and calling for help. Drake wasn’t holding out much hope that any one of them would able to suppress the results of Jesse’s accidental magic on their own. Most of them, working together, might be able to do something about it, though. Drake just hoped the multitude of charms and spells they’d layered over Jesse would alert the other four on Jesse Watch if the accidental magic took whoever was on him at the moment out of action when it exploded and the person on duty wasn’t able to contact the others.

Granger caught up with the two of them just as they entered the transporter. “Why are we running?” she demanded, barely even breathless.

Drake eyed her. “You don’t know what’s happening and you saw us running, so you figured you’d come too?” he asked skeptically.

She shrugged. “I’m bored, honestly. If I have to stay here, fine—but there’s nothing for me to do. I barely have clearance to look at anything here yet, though Colonel Sheppard keeps telling me he’s working on it,” she frowned briefly, then her face brightened. “I figured whatever you’re running towards will be exciting, at least.”

“One of the ‘Viathans is landing on the east pier!” Jesse shouted excitedly. He’d been a little pent up lately, and it was only a few days into his grounding. Drake shuddered to think of what the end of the month would be like.

“Brilliant!” Granger grinned widely, and Drake forced himself not to linger on the wildly frizzy tendrils of curling hair that’d escaped the knot at the nape of her neck to frame her face, or the way she ran toward perceived danger rather than away.

“You’re both mental, you are,” Drake muttered as the transporter doors slid open to reveal the literal Leviathan sinking the east pier. He held the two of them back as he radioed the tower to make sure the pier was stable. The tower confirmed that while the Leviathan’s immense mass had literally tilted the city in the water—the west pier was almost six feet higher out of the water than usual—neither the pier nor the city were in danger of sinking, despite the centimeters of water sloshing around the Leviathan’s thrusters. It was stood on its end, looking remarkably more like an Earth rocket than a Wraith cruiser when seen vertical rather than horizontal, and loomed, motionless.

“Is it the one McKay is on?” Drake asked Jesse, hopefully. Perhaps the Colonel would stop being such a bear if McKay was finally back on Atlantis. Drake was afraid, however, that the Colonel’s attitude had more to do with the severe restrictions Carson had him on, and the mandatory sessions with the physical therapist Doctor Pavel “call me Pasha” Primakov (known somewhat affectionately by the Marines as “The Sadist”).

“No, boss ‘Viathan’s still in orbit,” Jesse replied absentmindedly, pointing up. He’d probably pointed directly at the Leviathan he was talking about, Drake thought ruefully. Jesse was still the best at communicating with the Leviathan, enough so that he had no problem talking to them while they were in geosynchronous orbit over the city, which made Drake wonder why this one had chosen to land. Anything they’d wanted to say, they could have said from space.

“Oh,” Granger said suddenly, looking shocked. “Yes, I can!” she said happily, but for no apparent reason. “No, I don’t know how,” she added a moment later, sounding aggrieved, and then began visibly concentrating on something very hard. Her expression shifted rapidly through a range of disparate emotions too fast for Drake to keep track of, and she ended looking tragically bereaved. “That’s horrible,” she breathed, and Jesse nodded.

“I’m feeling decidedly left out here,” Drake commented mildly. He guessed that the two of them were speaking with the Leviathan, but he couldn’t hear anything. He felt a faint caress against his mind, and recanted. _I can’t hear anything from the Leviathan, I mean,_ he told Atlantis affectionately, and was rewarded with one of her odd mental hugs. Sometimes she reminded him of his mother—or, rather, of the person his mother would have been if she’d never married his father, or had Bellatrix for a sister.

“He’s keeping his mind small so he doesn’t hurt anyone,” Jesse explained.

“But you can hear him,” Draco replied, confused. Granger was still just staring at the Leviathan, absorbed in a conversation of her own.

“I can always hear them, ever since they reached our solar system,” Jesse shrugged. “Boss ‘Viathan says my head feels more like theirs than it does your guys’s, maybe because I’m little or maybe because I’m strong, he doesn’t know. It doesn’t bug me, I’m used to it,” Jesse explained, sounding remarkably unconcerned.

Drake wondered suddenly if having almost two hundred Leviathan constantly talking in the back of his brain had anything to do with Jesse’s seemingly sudden improved grasp on language in the past few weeks. The kid had, according to Colonel Sheppard and McKay, always taken to the sciences like a duck to water, but getting him to enunciate properly or follow grammatical rules had always been a struggle. _That would explain a lot,_ Drake thought, but he had to ask, “Doesn’t it get annoying, having them always there? Not having any privacy, or not being able to concentrate all your attention on something?”

Jesse gave him a strange look. “I’m five,” he said baldly. “I barely have any privacy anyway. And it’s not like they’re always talking to me.” He thought for a moment, scrunching his face up. “It’s like when Dad is watching a movie and I’m doing something else. It’s not distracting, it’s just sounds,” he said, face smoothing. He shook his head suddenly and tugged at Granger’s sleeve. “No, not like that,” he told her, “like this,” and then did absolutely nothing that Drake could see. Exciting. He looked up, trying to spot the Leviathan orbiting the planet through the clouds.

“Oh, right!” Granger said, recapturing Drake’s attention. She shook her head a little, her eyes clearing, and she smiled at Drake when she caught his eyes. He caught himself smiling back, and smoothed out his expression. He really wished she’d stop doing that.

“Anyway, sorry for the distraction. Right. This one, um,” she looked briefly at the Leviathan looming on the pier, “Er—he wants to be called Rowena, since his mental name is mainly images—came down to deliver a message,” she said.

“Rowena?” Drake couldn’t help himself.

“They don’t have gender, or separate sexes, so he—or I guess I should call him her, to reduce confusion—doesn’t really understand what I meant when I said that’s a female name. He said I should just use gender-neutral pronouns, but we don’t really have those, not officially,” she grimaced. “Off topic. Anyway, Rowena says that the ones here aren’t all the free ones, and that there’s one coming into the heliosphere that needs assistance, so some of them are going to go get him. Her. It,” she frowned. “This is going to get confusing soon.”

Jesse rolled his eyes. “It’s not like they care. Just use the one that goes with the name they want unless they say otherwise.”

 _Okay,_ Drake thought, _Someone’s getting awfully teenaged awfully quick._ Drake was starting to suspect that Jesse’s accidental magic might be both smaller and bigger than anyone had expected. The kid was smart, and surrounded by adults who were equally or almost as intelligent, but Jesse rarely got any respect or consideration for his ideas because he was five. What might that five year old want, then? Maybe to grow up faster. He pulled a face at Granger, but shook his head when she looked at him curiously. He’d have to ask her about it later—if it was even possible, for one, because Drake might just be imagining things—when one of the other three were on duty. No use in worrying anyone now, or giving Jesse ideas if he didn’t have them already, not until it was more than just a vague suspicion.

“So they’re just warning us that some of them are leaving, that’s it?” Drake asked, curious, pushing the other matter to the back of his mind. “Couldn’t they tell Jesse that from orbit?”

Jesse nodded, eyeing Granger patiently, like he was waiting for her to get on with it. Like he knew what she was going to say. Drake didn’t like that—if Granger was hesitating…

“Well, Rowena wants to take me on a shakedown cruise,” Granger admitted quickly. “She wants to see if we’re compatible.”

“Sounds like a blind date from eHarmony,” Drake said mockingly, inwardly panicking. Yes, the Leviathan were fast, but he needed to talk to Granger. She couldn’t leave for a day, or a week—at least not until they’d discussed Jesse’s possible accidental magic.

“Yes, yes, make fun if you must,” Granger replied calmly, not rising to the bait. “But really, there’s not much else for me to do here until I get clearance, and it would be a brilliant way to further our study of the Leviathan. Plus, I might end up compatible, and get to be a pilot!” she exclaimed, nearly bouncing with happiness. She hadn’t ever expressed any desire for a spaceship of her very own before, and kept citing her responsibilities back on Earth whenever Drake tried to ask how long she’d be on Atlantis, but he didn’t suspect any outside influence, either. He knew all about secret impossible dreams, and spaceship captain seemed like one that would fit Granger.

“Can you delay it for a few days, you think?” Drake asked desperately.

“I don’t see why I would,” Granger said, cocking her head to the side to stare at him curiously. “The wounded Leviathan coming into the system needs help.”

“But the other Leviathan are going anyway,” Drake argued, ignoring the secretive smile on Jesse’s face and the way his head was swinging back and forth between them like he was watching a tennis match. “So it wouldn’t much matter if you delayed your ‘getting to know you’ trip for a few days, would it?”

“Well, no, not really,” Granger agreed, though she was beginning to sound annoyed. “But again, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t go now.”

“Because–” Drake scrambled for a reason. ‘I want to talk to you’ would just inspire her to respond that he could talk to her now, which he couldn’t, not with Jesse there, for all the reasons he’d thought about just a few minutes ago. Saying that, however, would completely give away the whole thing to Jesse, and if Jesse was doing what Drake thought he was doing, but didn’t know it, Drake didn’t want to panic the kid. Who knew what might happen. “Because–” he stalled for time, and finally grabbed at the least-painful option available to him. “Because I want to ask you to have dinner with me,” he blurted, feeling his face flush bright red as soon as he snapped his mouth shut.

Granger stared at him blankly for a moment, and then her expression darkened. “You’re having me on,” she said angrily.

“No, truth,” Drake lied. “I feel like we’ve gotten on fairly well with each other while you’ve been here, and you’re brilliant, and funny, and lovely, and I’d like to spend more time with you,” Drake mentally beat his head against the wall as he deliberately didn’t say anything untrue, remembering the Leviathan in her head and not knowing if they could somehow tell when someone was lying. He’d explain it all later, pleading idiocy and urgency, and hopefully she’d take pity on him.

“Yeah, okay,” Granger finally said, sounding extremely skeptical. “I want to see where this goes.” Her tone of voice implied she would be waiting for a practical joke rather than a good-night kiss, but Drake didn’t let himself worry about it. It wasn’t like it wasn’t a ploy to get her alone—to talk about Jesse, who was still watching them with mischievous amusement. Drake wondered what Jesse knew, or what Jesse thought he knew.

“Brilliant,” he sighed, relieved. A little excited, too, if just for the trappings of a date, which was something he hadn’t been on in far too long. All the military were under him in the command structure—besides the Colonels, who were off limits for the same reason in reverse, plus the Uniform Code—and the few scientists and other civilians he’d been attracted to had all either ‘been there, done that’ with him early in his stay on Atlantis when he’d been fresh meat, or were in committed relationships. It’d been a long while since he’d had a nice candlelit dinner, or something of the sort, especially since it was hard for him to see the point with someone he wasn’t legally allowed to tell the truth to until they’d said “I do.”

His response apparently confused Granger further, and she hesitated for a moment. “I’m going to spend some time with Rowena,” she said finally. “Why don’t you two get back to what you were doing, and I’ll see you later,” she waved them off, still looking after them with puzzlement when Drake glanced back after he and Jesse had entered the transporter. When she noticed him looking back at her, she flushed and turned to stride purposefully toward the Leviathan—Rowena—where door slid open for her, and she disappeared from sight before the transporter doors closed.

Drake looked down at Jesse, who grinned back at him. “What are you up to?” Drake asked, eyes narrowing.

“Nothing,” Jesse said innocently. “It’s just nice that Miss Granger has so many reasons to stay on Atlantis. Isn’t it?” he asked, his voice turning strangely stern for a moment.

“Yes,” Drake answered the odd child slowly. He imagined having Granger at his back as they cut down Wraith all around them, and as they ran toward more, and he imagined exchanging grins fierce with battle fever. “Yes it is,” Drake agreed again, his voice warming. Granger would be a brilliant asset to have around, especially if she was working with Rowena. And he’d finally have someone to talk to about magical theory who wouldn’t zone out two minutes in like Marky and Stacks invariably did, and who actually had the time to talk about it with him, unlike Zelenka. It was really unfortunate that her best friend was Harry Potter, or she’d be perfect. He wondered, suddenly, whatever had happened to the Weasel.

Jesse spent the rest of Drake’s shift asking him about his plans for his “daaaaate” with Granger, so it was no surprise that by the time Drake’s shift on Jesse Watch was over, the whole base knew about it. Thank Merlin that Potter was already back in the U.K., or Drake suspected he would have been Sectumsemprad in minutes flat after leaving Jesse’s side.

As it was, Drake despaired of ever hearing the end of it when everyone eventually found out that dinner with Granger had been a ploy for a word in private, an excuse to talk without a certain pair of little ears hanging around.

***

“Oh, you’re here,” Granger said, surprised, when he went to meet her on the east pier at dinnertime. He’d figured—correctly, it seemed—that she would lose track of time while exploring Rowena. He grimaced at the thought that raised, then quickly shifted his expression to a smile. He made it real by remembering his imaginings of a Granger permanently assigned to Atlantis, fighting at his side, with no quickly-approaching end to her stay in sight.

“Yep,” he agreed, overly brightly, and turned it down a notch. “You ready for dinner?” he asked, hoping she wouldn’t suggest getting food from the mess and bringing it down to eat in or by Rowena. What Rowena heard, Jesse would hear. Drake realized his miscalculation, and wondered what Rowena’s range with Granger was. “She,” he nodded to the ship, “won’t hear us– I mean, you can have privacy?” he asked, quickly rewording his question when he realized how she might take it.

Granger narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously, though her cheeks were flushed with suppressed amusement. “I don’t know, I haven’t experimented yet. Why do you want privacy?” she asked archly.

“Just to talk,” Drake replied weakly. This was already going poorly. She was going to eviscerate him when he explained. He brought up a map of Atlantis in his mind, trying to figure out which public areas on the opposite side of Atlantis were well-traveled enough not to put her on the defensive and private enough that they could talk without eavesdroppers. Hopefully the other side of the city was far enough away that Rowena—and thus Jesse—wouldn’t overhear what they were talking about from Granger’s mind. And, fuck, he had to take Atlantis’s sensors and cameras into account as well, because Drake knew she’d delight in eavesdropping on them for Jesse. The city was something of a gossip. He sent her a preventative wave of apology and affection, just in case she’d picked that up, and added a request for privacy he hoped she’d heed. _The hydroponic gardens for the mess are on that side of the city, and they are enormous as well as pretty, and have very few cameras,_ Atlantis informed Drake with a barrage of images and an encompassing wave of amusement.

“So…” Granger trailed off. “What are we doing?” she asked, seeming to have given up her suspicion for the moment.

“Dinner in the gardens?” Drake asked, and then cussed himself out mentally for making it a question.

“Sounds lovely,” Granger sounded surprised.

Drake felt strangely offended. “I can do lovely,” he protested, glowering.

“I’m not arguing,” Granger laughed. “I just wasn’t expecting it,” she explained, eyes bright with something Drake couldn’t decipher.

They traded quips on the way to the back door of the mess hall, where he picked up two of the ‘to go’ baskets the mess staff made up for each meal, anticipating the scientists who wanted to work while they ate. Drake was conscious of all the eyes on them, both human and technological, and kept things light as they wandered towards the gardens. He kept their pace slow, because walking with purpose would give people the wrong—or right—impression, and this was supposed to be a date, not a clandestine meeting.

Searching for other lighthearted topics once they’d exhausted the current ones, Drake came up blank. “What happened with you and the Wea– Weasley?” he asked, because he was curious and because they were almost there, but not close enough to walk the rest of the way in silence.

“We grew apart,” Granger shrugged, looking at Drake sidelong, her eyes unreadable. “We’re still friends, though, so it would be nice if you could call him Ron,” she added, a non sequitur if Drake had ever heard one. “He wanted the excitement of the Aurors, and I wanted to try a normal life.”

Drake couldn’t help himself. His eyebrows flew up to his hairline, and he looked around them pointedly. “Yes, I can see how much you prefer the ‘normal’ life,” he said, complete with air quotes. He watched, fascinated, the way her blush crept up from her neck to redden her whole face.

“I wanted to explore my options,” she said primly, her blush not fading, “Not start a family at nineteen and not stop until I hit forty.” Drake grimaced at the thought of that many sprogs underfoot. They passed through the door to the gardens and kept wandering, Drake too engaged with the topic at hand to bring up what he’d brought her here to talk about in the first place.

“So you don’t want kids, then?” he asked.

“A few, maybe, later on. When I’m ready for a more domestic type of excitement in my life,” she explained. “But right now I have _this_ ,” she waved at everything around them, and while it was essentially just a giant hydroponics farm, Drake knew what exactly she meant. Boy, did he know. “Can you imagine giving this up to chase after toddlers every waking minute?” she asked, strangely adamant. Drake guessed it was an old argument come back to haunt her.

“I don’t have to,” he said wryly, “I have three hundred Marines to chase after every waking minute here instead. I have it on good authority that they’re worse than toddlers, at least according to the Colonel’s experience,” he laughed, and even though it was the absolute perfect segue, he ignored it. “How about here?” he asked, changing the subject and indicating a bench someone had shoved up against one of Atlantis’s many windows.

“Yes, it’s fine,” Granger said absentmindedly, even as she sat and started unpacking the basket Drake handed her. “But do you want kids, then?” she asked, firmly back on topic.

“I don’t know,” Drake shrugged, feeling put on the spot. “The thought is nice, for sometime in the future, but…” he trailed off and motioned at himself. “I’ve not really had the relevant experience to be a good father,” he made himself say nonchalantly, looking away to investigate his own basket. Almost-ham and eggplant sandwiches, tomato juice, and carrot sticks. Interesting. The kitchen staff must have embarked on a new plan of attack when it came to getting the city to eat their vegetables—no other options.

Granger snorted. “I don’t think ‘gesturing at all of you’ is generally an accepted argument,” she said, thankfully not deciding to dig into Drake’s myriad father issues.

“Alright, be honest,” Drake put down his sandwich and leaned forward intently, making his voice solemn and putting on his serious face. Granger eyed him suspiciously, taking a deliberate bite of her own sandwich. “Exactly how many films did you watch when you first re-integrated into the muggle world?” Drake asked gravely

“Oh, Merlin,” Granger laughed through her food, then made a face and spat the bite of her sandwich into her palm unselfconsciously. “This is genuinely horrible,” she remarked, and then answered him. “Too many, enough so I think my parents forgot I was visiting once. Netflix is a marvel, and it makes me wish wizarding society would catch up with the times. You know, the workarounds to ensure magic doesn’t fizzle around technology, and vice versa, are ridiculously simple! Muggle-borns do it all the time, as well as witches and wizards who marry muggles, but the rest of wizarding society,” she broke off to shake her head.

Drake grinned. “Love the past too much to ever move forward?” he asked dryly. “When I wear a robe nowadays, I feel as if I’m cosplaying a priest in a historical drama,” he said, and immediately regretted letting that slip. “Have you been to the any of the American wizarding towns, seen how different they are?” he asked quickly, hoping to distract her.

“Like San Diego in California?” she asked, laughing at him. Not letting it go, then. “No, no I haven’t.”

“You should,” he told her weakly.

She went in for the kill anyway, but not the one he was expecting. “Alright, Drake,” she said firmly, and put down her sandwich. Drake startled at her use of his name—it’d been Major Morris this and Major Morris that ever since she’d come to Atlantis. “I’m not stupid. What did you want to talk to me about without Rowena listening in on?”

Well, that was over with then. “Jesse,” he said simply, putting his own sandwich back in its basket. Really not very good, that. Granger looked surprised, and pleasantly so. Drake wondered what she’d thought he’d wanted to discuss, but put the question aside. “He can hear all the Leviathan all the time, and I think I may have spotted his accidental magic, but if I’m not right—or even if I am, I guess—I don’t want him to know about it until we know what to do about it, or at least have the start of a plan.”

“I’m listening,” Granger said, engaged in the conversation now in a way he hadn’t noticed she wasn’t before. _She must have been amazingly suspicious of the dinner invite,_ Drake thought a little mournfully. He’d thought he’d had her trust now.

“Have you noticed how quickly he seems to be maturing now?” he hedged, not wanting to say it out loud yet, in case it came true. “I know you hadn’t ever met him before, but…”

“I can say with absolute certainty that I was completely astonished when he told me he was five,” Granger interrupted to confirm. “He’s intelligent, yes, but no matter how smart you are, your brain still develops at relatively the same pace. I thought he was small for his age, but I would have guessed at least seven, perhaps even nine.”

Drake sighed. “Yeah. He loves to learn, and not being able to understand things frustrates him in a way that I’m used to only seeing from McKay. He idolizes the scientists—and soldiers, for that matter—who treat him like an adult, but most of the rest of them don’t give a second thought to him past his age, and ignore everything he has to contribute. Which is a _lot_ ,” Drake emphasized, “even before he came to Atlantis, and before he started seeming to grow up faster. I mean, he built a miniature working replica of a puddle jumper with McKay’s help when he was four. So I think a big part of it is natural, especially since he isn’t actually growing any faster, but his everything else–” Drake sighed.

Granger nodded slowly. “I see what you mean. I think the best plan of action is to inform both Jesse and the heads of Atlantis, but you were right. If it had just been in your head, then Jesse might have embraced the idea and tried to do it on purpose, with disastrous results. We should schedule a meeting with Colonel Sheppard for tomorrow morning,” she said, and began packing away the rest of her mess basket.

“So I’m forgiven for the fake date?” Drake asked, laughing, and followed her lead. Apparently they were done here.

“Oh, I don’t know. It didn’t seem all that fake to me, except for maybe the food,” Granger said, looking at him sidelong as she closed up her basket. She stood, leaving her basket on the bench, and leaned in to breathe into his ear, “Bet you can’t catch me,” and took off running.

"What is even happening?" Drake asked the empty garden, even as he took off after her. He just wanted to catch up and find out what the hell she was on about, that's all.

***

The next morning found Drake naked and staring at the ceiling of Rowena's flight deck, equally bemused and panicking—and not because of their impending meeting with Colonel Sheppard. Potter was going to find a way put out an inter-galactic hit on Drake as soon as he got wind of this, Drake just knew it.

“Stop thinking about Harry while we’re naked,” Granger groaned, rolling over and draping herself against him. She dug her chin into his chest and peered at him with sleep-heavy eyes, her wild mass of hair haloing widely enough around her face to block out much of the light.

Drake froze—he’d thought she was still asleep. “I thought Rowena couldn’t see inside my head.”

“She can, but she’s not. You get this wrinkle, just here,” Granger poked at his forehead, “when you think about Harry. Seriously—naked, stop.”

“It’s hard, knowing he’s going to eviscerate me as soon as my next Earth leave comes up,” Drake grumbled, trying frantically to think of a way out of this, even though he’d long lost any chance of sneaking out and the both of them pretending this had all never happened. Granger was quickly becoming the closest thing to a best friend he’d had since the war—his first war—and now, well. That had obviously just gone down in flames (and orgasms. Brilliant, exceptional orgasms. Granger was, quite possibly, a sex goddess).

Granger smiled wickedly at Drake and stretched against him languorously. Drake groaned as her smooth skin and soft curves shifted against him. He started to hope—despite himself—for another round, especially if this was the last time they’d be comfortable around one another.

Instead, Granger checked her watch and sat up, grabbing up their clothing and dressing quickly. “We’ve a meeting with Colonel Sheppard in about fifteen minutes,” she told Drake, chucking his pants at his head. He pulled them on and went on a search of his own for his BDU trousers and blouse, getting dressed in record time.

“Gonna see if I can grab a shower,” he said over his shoulder as he ran out of Rowena. _Oh, Merlin,_ he thought to himself as her laughter followed him out of the Leviathan and made the blood spark in his veins, _What have I gotten myself into now?_

Drake was long used to the way sex with people complicated things and ended his friendships. He hadn’t wanted to lose what he’d had with Granger, but now, well. He took a moment to bang his head against the wall of the transporter before he hit the screen for the hall next to his quarters. Now he was going to have to work with her and be around her and try harder than he ever had to not let himself ruin things. He wanted to keep Granger around. _I’m not going to let this change anything,_ he ordered himself. _I’m not going to scare Granger off, and I’m not going to be weird_ , Drake vowed, even though he didn’t have very high hopes of being able to follow through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Halfway through last chapter I was losing steam, so I went and made an outline for the next chapter to encourage me to get on with it. That outline was: "oh look hermione accidentally has a spaceship now and will probably be here forever and why is she so attractive, life is horrible, she’s best friends with potter i’m not doing this--okay oops i did it with granger, now what," copy and pasted for your enjoyment, because I still think it's one of the funniest things I've ever written.
> 
> I will change the tags to reflect current pairings when I post the next chapter. This kinda came out of nowhere, and I don't want to ruin the surprise for anyone reading along :)
> 
> If you want to know the status of the next chapter or bug me just because, I've just started using the tumblr I've had for, like, two years (n1rd.tumblr.com)


	21. In which there are misunderstandings on the mainland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Can you really consider something a vacation when it includes SERE training? Shawn's pretty sure the answer's no.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for emotional trauma, discussions of rape, and a sketchy sexual situation.

SHAWN

Shawn and Eliot had chosen the mainland for their exile, over traveling back through the wormhole to Earth to finish out their leave, because the mainland meant that none of Eliot’s or Shawn’s friends or family could drop in on them unexpectedly.

They’d intended to stay at the Athosian camp, because it was more or less a vacation, and the Athosian’s tent city included at least a few of the modern amenities Shawn associated with vacations (though not, sadly, mattresses or indoor plumbing).

That had lasted a single night.

The cuddling had been nice, even if it was on a rope mattress, but Shawn had been extremely conscious of the fact the tent next to theirs held a family with multiple tiny children in it. The next day, during the communal breakfast, Shawn yanked Eliot in close and whispered gravely, “Seriously, El, I’m all for exhibitionism and everything, but there are kids everywhere and the walls here are made of sheets. I can’t have sex here. I want to have sex. Fix the problem, please.”

Eliot quickly made their excuses, saying something about some “much needed training” (that Shawn wished he’d paid more attention to later in the day), and a call to Atlantis. Neither of them were sure exactly how adamant Big Brother had been when he told them to get off the city for four days, but they decided not to risk it by returning for supplies—mostly in case something happened and they were pressed into duty while they were on the city and their leave got cut short again. So Eliot had bribed one of his Marine buddies into doing a flyby of the encampment and dropping off some equipment, and Shawn and Eliot went camping.

Well, Shawn called it camping. Eliot called it “A golden opportunity for some modified SERE training.” That should have Shawn’s suspicions, but again, he was too trusting. He didn’t realize what Eliot was intending until a few hours into their hellish hike inland.

As Shawn tried to keep up with the brutal pace Eliot was setting, Eliot—who still had the breath to talk, even though Shawn was working on just not keeling over and dying, himself—started to explained that he figured that sooner or later Shawn was going to be needed offworld for some reason in the middle of an emergency, at least the way things had been going lately, and Eliot wanted him to be able to survive. So, Eliot had decided—without taking into consideration he was doing this to his newly-minted fiancé, who _totally had the ability_ to rewind their relationship to just boyfriends—that since they were already out here, he might as well put Shawn though some modified survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training.

Nothing too hardcore, according to Eliot, because this was supposed to be a vacation, after all.

 _Or was it?_ Shawn wondered. Big Brother had implied it was supposed to be a punishment, and Shawn was beginning to wonder if he’d put Eliot up to this.

But, Eliot had explained, it would be in-depth enough so that Eliot could have a little confidence that Shawn would survive offworld long enough for Eliot to get to him (because that, apparently, wasn’t never going to happen).

Shawn wasn’t quite as thrilled with the plan.

***

“I don’t need to know which bugs I can eat to survive—even if your nightmare scenario comes to pass, logically, the planet I’m stuck on _won’t have these bugs,_ ” Shawn complained, loudly and _accurately_.

Eliot ignored him, and kept trying to teach him how to make a fully-balanced meal out of grubs and leaves.

 _Screw this,_ Shawn thought, and took off his pants. Well, pushed them down, along with his underwear, but same difference.

Eliot stopped talking to look at him and raise his eyebrows. “That’s not going to help you survive,” he said coolly.

Shawn narrowed his eyes at him. “That’s what you think,” he argued. “Without a little stress relief, I’m either going to kill myself or attempt to kill you, which would ultimately be assisted suicide. Thus,” he gestured at his crotch, “survival.” Eliot rolled his eyes and went back to whatever fancy SERE thing he was doing now—Shawn had stopped consciously paying attention a while ago.

Shawn shrugged, “Suit yourself. I’m coming whether you’re helping or not.” He started lazily stroking his dick as he watched Eliot. “It’s like a particularly prudish men’s military calendar,” Shawn grinned, pretty much just trying to get a rise out of him now.

Eliot didn’t respond, turning his back to Shawn. That just gave Shawn a truly excellent view of a superbly muscled back and ass, so it didn’t deter him at all. Plus, he could see that Eliot’s ears were bright red, since Eliot had yanked his hair back into a ponytail earlier, when he was trying to teach Shawn how to build things out of sticks. It could be anger, instead of embarrassment entwined with lust, Shawn supposed—but angry Eliot was hot too.

Shawn’s Angry Eliot theory was laid to rest, however, when Eliot started reaching for things in what had to be the most awkward way possible, but which highlighted the lines of his muscles very, very nicely.

Shawn groaned in appreciation. “Take it off, soldier,” he laughed—but then Eliot stood up and took off his shirt. _Fuck, yes._ Shawn could work with this.

“Turn around,” he ordered quietly, and Eliot didn’t move. His back was fucking gorgeous, but still. Shawn wanted to see the rest of him. “Turn around, Corporal,” Shawn tried next, and it worked. Eliot turned to face him, but didn’t meet Shawn’s eyes. He was looking somewhere off to Shawn’s right, and his face was bright red.

It was actually really hot, Eliot’s embarrassment, and the way he was doing it anyway. He’d even started it, when he’d obeyed Shawn’s rhetorical cat-call. “Fuck, you’re pretty,” Shawn breathed, and Eliot’s ribs heaved with deep gasps of air, his blush starting to creep down his neck and across his chest.

They were in the middle of the woods, on alien planet in another galaxy, and the Athosian camp was a hellish eight mile hike towards the shore. No one was around. Shawn wasn’t too horribly disappointed about any of this, not anymore.

“Come stand in front of me, Corporal,” Shawn ordered, following the rules of their sexy game of Simon Says. Eliot complied. “Take off your pants, soldier,” Shawn said quietly. Eliot obeyed Shawn’s orders to the letter—leaving his boxer-briefs on, and working the BDU pants over his boots rather than taking them off too. He was remarkably steady as he stood on each leg to untuck his pant legs from his boots and drag them off each foot, even though if Shawn had tried it, he would have fallen flat on his face two seconds into the attempt.

Shawn found a convenient tree and leaned back against it, still casually fisting his cock. He’d meant for Eliot to get totally naked, and knew Eliot knew it too. “Drop and give me twenty, Corporal,” he decided finally, after admiring Eliot’s stock-still parade rest for a moment. It looked particularly nice with the black combat boots and boxer-briefs accenting the golden lines of the rest of him, especially with the bulge tenting his black underwear deliciously.

Eliot dropped straight down into plank position and began a set of push-ups with mechanical perfection, sweat beading in the hollow of his back. It wasn’t that warm out—it was spring on the mainland, despite the way some of Atlantis’ population was gearing up for Earth’s winter holidays—and Shawn knew Eliot could normally do a lot more without breaking a sweat. “Do you like me looking at you, Corporal?” Shawn asked quietly.

“Yes, sir,” Eliot said flatly, still doing push-ups. Shawn hadn’t been counting, so he hoped Eliot was.

“Do you like me telling you that you’re pretty, Corporal?” Shawn asked.

“Yes, sir,” Eliot replied in the same flat tone, then apparently finished his push-ups, because he stopped pumping his arms and remained in plank position.

“Stand up, Corporal,” Shawn said after a minute or two. He was getting tired just watching Eliot, even though Eliot’s arms hadn’t even started to tremble yet. Eliot bounced to his feet like it was nothing, dropping immediately back into parade rest. The way Eliot clasped his hands behind his back made the definition in Eliot’s shoulder and chest muscles stand out in sharp relief. In short, it was very, very nice.

“Take your ponytail out,” Shawn murmured. “Show me your pretty hair, Corporal.” Eliot obeyed, shaking his hair out just once before returning to parade rest. Eliot’s dick was hard enough now that the head was beginning to peek out over the top of his waistband. “Show me your pretty cock, Corporal,” Shawn said softly, and Eliot pushed down the waistband of his boxer-briefs, snugging it under his balls, and returned his hands to behind his back. He was still looking somewhere off to Shawn’s right, though, and the way Eliot wasn’t meeting his eyes was beginning to make Shawn a little uncomfortable.

“Look at me, Corporal,” Shawn demanded, and Eliot met his eyes briefly, before dropping his gaze to stare down at Shawn’s cock. Shawn gripped himself tighter, even as he softened a little. Something didn’t feel right. “You gonna let me fuck your pretty, cherry ass, Corporal?” he asked, keeping his voice steady, even though it wanted to shake. That was something they’d never done, something Eliot had never wanted to try, though he’d never said why. He’d always just suggested they do something that sounded even better to Shawn instead, and so Shawn had never stopped to think too hard about how Eliot had always avoided being fucked.

“Yes, sir,” Eliot said again, his voice still the same flat thing it had been since Shawn had started this whole derailment of Eliot’s intended survival training thing.

Shawn let go of his dick as it softened, his hand shaking. An article he’d read for a case a few years ago flashed up on the screen in Shawn’s mind: _One in three women have been or will be raped in their lifetimes. This is fairly common knowledge. The statistic that isn’t common knowledge is that one in five men have been or will be raped in their lifetimes. The number is higher than most people know or guess, because men don’t report their assaults as often or aren’t taken seriously when they do._ A PSA Shawn had seen somewhere online, a few months before he skipped out of Santa Barbara, had rape victims repeating what their attackers or abusers had said to them, and most of the things they’d said sounded disgustingly similar to the things Shawn had just been saying. Shawn’s hands trembled as he yanked his clothes back into place.

“Put your clothes back on, soldier,” Shawn told Eliot, his voice trembling as much as his hands.

“Are you okay?” Eliot asked, voice heavy with concern, stepping out of parade rest and closer to Shawn. Shawn shied away. “Just, please, fucking put your clothes back on?” Shawn asked, feeling too disgusting to be touched. He’d been forcing Eliot to do something he’d never wanted to do, and Eliot had just gone along with it. His debriefing with Big Brother flashed up suddenly in his memory, replacing the PSA—

_“That sounds disconcertingly like a euphemism for torture,” Carson 2.0 muttered under his breath, brogue thick._

_“He doesn’t stop talking until you see things his way, so it kinda is,” Eliot said, shrugging. Shawn felt a little betrayed by the casual insult and gave Eliot the sad-face over his shoulder. Eliot smiled back at him reassuringly, but when Shawn turned back to face Big Brother, it took him longer than he liked to compose himself. Eliot was supposed to be on Shawn’s side._

—making Shawn heave a startled breath, and he had to consciously force himself not to literally heave. Shawn felt more nauseous now than he had when he’d gotten food poisoning at that sketchy seafood place on Santa Barbara’s boardwalk.

Thickly muscled arms suddenly wrapped around Shawn, pulling him away from the tree he’d been trying to become one with, hugging him tight against Eliot’s hastily re-clothed chest.

“Hey, hey, you’re alright, come on, I’ve got you,” Eliot soothed him, tucking Shawn’s head into his shoulder and rocking them a little. Shawn considered trying to get away—Eliot shouldn’t be touching him. Not after what Shawn had just done, and just almost done—but Shawn figured it would be a losing proposition. Eliot wouldn’t let go if he didn’t want to. Plus, selfishly, Shawn wanted the comfort, even though he knew that he should be the one giving comfort, not receiving it, in this situation. “I’m here, you can tell me anything, I’m here for you if you want to talk,” Eliot was still crooning to him nonsensically. He was acting like Shawn was the one who’d–

“Do I talk you into things you don’t want to do?” Shawn made himself get out of his head and just ask.

Eliot stopped rocking them for a moment, and Shawn could feel the startled surprise stiffening Eliot’s muscles—there were a lot of them, all pressed up tight against Shawn, so it would be hard not to. “Well, yeah,” Eliot said eventually, confused. “It makes you happy when I let you convince me, so of course I do.”

Shawn felt like he was going to be sick. Like, for real. “Let me go,” he demanded, pushing his way out of Eliot’s arms. Shawn stumbled a few steps away to lean against his tree, then folded over, puking up everything he’d eaten in the past week until he was dry heaving and crying with it.

“Whoa, hey, what’s wrong?” Eliot asked, sounding terrified. Shawn wondered how long he’d been crouched beside Shawn, steadying him and rubbing a hand soothingly up and down his back as Shawn’s stomach tried to crawl up his throat.

“Don’t touch me, god, how can you touch me?” Shawn asked, his voice cracked and hoarse from throwing up.

“You’re scaring me, baby,” Eliot said, sounding panicked. “Please, tell me what’s wrong. Are you hurt? Did something out here affect you, somehow? I’m calling for pickup, okay? Carson will figure out what’s wrong, he’ll fix you up, don’t worry.” He made sure Shawn was steady and backed away a few steps to grab the pack they’d stuffed the odds-and-ends in during their rush to get off the city before someone rescinded Big Brother’s order. The old-fashioned walkie-talkie type radio they hadn’t been allowed to leave Atlantis without was in there somewhere as well.

“I’m fine, I’m not hurt,” Shawn said numbly. “I’m not sick, I’m disgusting.”

“What do you mean, you’re disgusting?” Eliot asked, dumping the contents of the pack out and grabbing the radio up from the resulting mess.

“I make you do things you don’t want to do, but you do them anyway to make me happy. That’s rape,” Shawn said, his voice flat. “You’d do anything to make me happy, and I abuse that. It’s sick. I’m disgusting, because I like it.”

“Whoa, whoa, hey, no,” Eliot dropped the radio into the mess and was back at Shawn’s side in seconds flat. He grabbed Shawn and pulled him in tight, and Shawn went limply. “No, baby. No, I didn’t mean it like that. If I really didn’t want to do something, I wouldn’t do it just to make you happy. I wouldn’t kill someone just to cheer you up—well, maybe, but not some innocent– That’s a bad example,” Eliot stumbled to a stop and took a moment to regroup. “If you’re arguing me into doing something,” Eliot restarted, sounding more confident, “by the time you convince me to do it, I want to do it. If I didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t let you convince me. I didn’t let you convince me to move into your drycleaner, did I? Or when you wanted to dress up as Peter Pan and zipline over the docks? When I said I do things to make you happy, I meant that in the way that all couples do things to make each other happy, you know?” He pulled back from Shawn enough to look at him.

Shawn looked back at him. Eliot looked sincere, but– “You were going to let me fuck you. You never want it, and you were going to let me order you to let me fuck you, even though you didn’t want it,” Shawn tried to explain. “You let me make you to fuck my throat that time, even though you didn’t want to—you wanted to take me to the hospital, and I made you fuck me instead,” he tried again.

Eliot shook his head. “Sweetheart,” he said softly, kindly, “I know so many ways to take a man out I can’t even count them anymore. You can’t _make_ me do anything I don’t want to do.”

“Emotional manipulation isn’t the same as physical coercion!” Shawn exploded, yanking himself out of Eliot’s arms. “Just because I can’t hold you down and force you to take it doesn’t mean it isn’t rape—women rape men all the time, and most women can’t overpower most men!” Shawn hugged himself, collecting his thoughts and going over what he’d just said. “Or actually, I mean emotional manipulation is the same as physical coercion—it’s just as bad, if not worse.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t!” Eliot shouted, then heaved in a deep breath and scrubbed his hands back through his hair. “Sorry. Okay—did I rape you when I pinned you against the shed and choked you out? I was restraining you and cutting off your air, and you couldn’t have stopped me if you’d wanted to.”

“No, I wanted that. I told you about it, and you knew beforehand that I wanted it,” Shawn argued. “That’s not the same.”

“Okay, so it’s the talking that’s tripping you up,” Eliot muttered to himself. Shawn protested wordlessly with an exasperated roar that made the forest around them go silent, too frustrated now to even come up with the words that might make Eliot understand.

Eliot just held up his hands calmly, almost like he was surrendering, and said firmly, “Give me a second, please.”

Shawn gave him more than a second, even though it was killing him to just sit there silently and let Eliot think.

“Okay,” Eliot finally said. “I like it when you talk me into things when we’re fucking. It makes it better for me. I never said anything because I thought you knew,” he met Shawn’s eyes and smiled wryly at the face Shawn felt himself making, “and yes, that was stupid, because I know you can’t read minds. The you fucking me thing–” he broke off abruptly. “You know you’re the first man I’ve been with, right?”

Shawn nodded, making himself stay quiet and listen, despite how much he wanted to interrupt and argue his point.

“You were the first man I was ever attracted to—it was like you kick-started the attraction to men I’d never noticed I’d had, ramped it up so I couldn’t ignore it anymore,” Eliot elaborated. “It freaked me out and fucked me up, I know you remember that. Everything I’ve ever done with you terrified me when I thought about it, but I got over it really fucking fast once we started actually fucking,” he grinned, then sobered. “But the ass thing—that still scared me, you know? Everything else we’ve done I’d had some experience with, or I could at least relate it to something I’d experienced with women. But no woman had ever put anything bigger than a finger up my ass, so the thought of it kinda paralyzed me?” he asked, then shook his head. “Not a question. But it wasn’t because I didn’t want it—I do, and I know you’d make it good—but it scared me. And I’m done letting stupid shit like that scare me, so,” Eliot shrugged.

“So you thought a good first time would be while we were camping in the woods on an alien planet, roleplaying a dub-con scenario without having ever even discussed safewords,” Shawn said skeptically, and just looked at Eliot. “Oh, my god, you did,” Shawn realized, amazed at Eliot’s… Eliotness.

“Safewords?” Eliot looked at Shawn like he’d lost it. “No one was beating on anyone, why would we need safewords?”

Shawn clutched at his hair. “You’re not even fucking with me, are you,” Shawn said flatly. “Seriously?” Eliot just raised his eyebrows.

“You use safewords for knives and whips and shit like that,” Eliot said slowly, like he’d thought _Shawn_ was the one who’d lost the plot, here.

“Oh. My. God,” Shawn said, aghast. “So, basically, your sex life was essentially hardcore sadistic/masochistic pain play or straight vanilla? And we’ve been–” Shawn cut himself off and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. From now on, fucking safeword out of anything that makes you uncomfortable, I don’t care if we’re fucking arguing about cheese in the middle of the grocery store or talking about living arrangements or wedding plans or if we’re full-on balls-deep in the middle of fucking and you suddenly change your mind about it, okay? Please?”

“Cheese?” Eliot asked, grinning.

“Promise me,” Shawn glared at him.

“Okay, okay, I got it,” Eliot dropped the grin and said solemnly. “Safeword out of anything and everything if it’s fucking me up. Except military maneuvers,” Eliot added, shrugging. “Promise.”

Shawn would take it, even though Eliot was being a smartass, because Eliot was a smartass a lot. It was a coping mechanism, Shawn was pretty sure. “Okay, awesome,” he agreed, relieved. “What’s your safeword?”

“Cheese,” Eliot smirked.

Shawn took a moment to stare up at the sky. _Feelings are hard,_ Shawn reminded himself. _Eliot shared his feelings anyway. I love Eliot a lot. I didn’t and never will rape Eliot. Life is good, even though my fiancé is kind of an asshole sometimes, because I’m an asshole a lot of the time too._ “Okay, if your safeword is cheese, then mine’s tomato,” Shawn said. Even though he was utterly emotionally exhausted, Shawn discovered he was still able to mock Eliot with a grin when Eliot slowly flushed red. “Yep, just like that,” Shawn agreed with the blood rushing to flood Eliot’s face, remembering fondly the sight of Eliot’s pants tangled around Eliot’s precious tomato plants back on Earth.

Shawn let his grin fade and sighed, scrubbing at his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. “Now that we’ve had ‘The Talk,’ can we fucking cuddle already? After I drink, like, a gallon of water, and my mouth stops tasting like ass,” Shawn said, feeling as pitiful as he probably sounded. “We can do the hard-limit shit and the whole ‘Intro to BDSM and Sexy Roleplaying 101’ thing some other time, right?” He was exhausted, and he just wanted a long nap in a soft bed with Eliot and lots of blankets. But since they were in the middle of the fucking woods, with not even a tent in sight, he’d take what he could get.

“Yeah,” Eliot said gently, handing Shawn one of the canteens. “But we’re gonna have to hike a little before we do that,” he added apologetically, “because the vomit’s gonna attract animals. You up for it?”

“Fucking Christ, this fucking day,” Shawn muttered, but nodded. He’d rather not have to interrupt getting his cuddle on with Eliot to fight off wild animals, or to watch Eliot fight off wild animals, as hot as it might sound.

“And after you’re cuddled out,” Eliot said, his back to Shawn as he repacked everything he’d dumped out looking for the radio earlier back into the pack it came from, “do you want to try again?”

“You just really want the first time I fuck you to be in the middle of the woods on an alien planet while we’re survival camping, don’t you?” Shawn asked rhetorically, and watched with bemusement as the back of Eliot’s neck, visible from the way his hair was swinging forward as he hunched over to the bag he’d dumped out, turned bright red.

“I’m marrying a kinky little fucker, I got to keep up,” Eliot muttered just loud enough for Shawn to hear.

So Shawn pushed him over. It seemed the appropriate course of action at the time.

***

They’d hiked for an hour before Eliot finally let them stop. He’d seemed to be keeping an eye out for something special, even though they’d left the danger of vomit-crazed wild-alien-animals behind after the first fifteen minutes, Shawn was pretty certain.

Shawn had to admit, however, that the place Eliot finally let them drop their packs was actually pretty perfect. They were right at the edge of a little grassy glade that was almost perfectly circular. It was near enough to a large stream to be convenient, but far enough away that the sound of the water wouldn’t cover the noise of someone or something approaching through the forest around them. It was gorgeous, bug free, and the grass was soft when Shawn knelt down to test it.

Eliot pulled one of those foil emergency blankets out of one of the packs, opened it up, wrapped it around himself and laid down. He didn’t say anything about setting up camp or building a fire or all the ways Shawn could use the things around them to survive. Eliot just opened his arms for Shawn to join him on the ground, so Eliot could wrap himself and the foil blanket around him. Shawn didn’t waste any time dropping his own pack and crawling into Eliot’s embrace.


	22. In which there is deception, discovery, and a much-needed discussion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Camping on the mainland with Eliot and Shawn, or is it modified basic offworld training with a few SERE tactics thrown in? Depends on who you ask.

ELIOT

Eliot kept his breathing even and steady as Shawn drifted into sleep, just a few minutes after he wrapped himself up in Eliot and the blanket. Eliot stayed awake, keeping watch. They hadn’t fortified their position at all, so he knew he couldn’t relax.

Apparently after the third or fourth new planet Atlantis had landed on, the city’s personnel had essentially just phoned in the ‘explore our new home’ thing beyond making sure there was nothing native to the planet in question’s ocean big enough or nasty enough to threaten the city. After relocating to this planet following the culling of their last one, the Athosians had done some exploring—but it would take lifetimes to learn all of the planet’s threats.

Even though Eliot’s body wanted rest after the day’s hike—eight miles to the first campsite, followed almost immediately by emotional upheaval and another hour’s hike uphill and inland—Eliot knew that letting himself sleep would put both him and Shawn in danger. Eliot had stayed awake longer in more difficult and dangerous situations, so he knew that he could make it through one sleepless night, and that it wouldn’t slow his reactions enough to risk their safety.

Scanning the woods around them became mostly pointless a few hours after dusk, when the first moon had set and the second hadn’t yet risen. Eliot shifted so that he could almost make out Shawn’s face in the dim starlight and let his eyes rest on the way the starlight turned Shawn’s skin silver and his hair black, concentrating on listening to the sounds of the planet until the second moon rose.

The second of this planet’s two moons was considerably bigger and brighter than the first, and was full to boot. The cool white light bathing the clearing wasn’t anything close to the light of the brighter-than-Sol star the planet orbited, but it was enough for Eliot to make out a few details in the clearing and surrounding woods. He occupied himself throughout the rest of the long and uneventful night (Eliot still wasn’t used to the planet’s longer days, even after living in Atlantis for so long) by planning out the changes he and Shawn would make to the area once the sun rose.

A fire there, a lean-to over there, a latrine about a two-minute hike into the forest—to keep the smell down and any runoff from reaching the stream—and a blind up in that big tree in case something came to investigate that was too big for them to handle with just the sidearm Eliot had brought. As the long night crept past, Eliot’s plans grew bigger and more elaborate, until the sky began to lighten with the sun’s imminent rising and Eliot realized what he’d built in his mind was more of a home than a temporary campsite.

_Well,_ Eliot thought to himself, brushing away his mild embarrassment with a mental shrug, _It’s strategic to have a bolthole in Pegasus, in case everything goes to shit and we can’t get home. Safe houses shouldn’t just be for Earth._

Shawn began stirring before the sun had crested the horizon, and Eliot stopped searching for trouble that wasn’t coming. Instead, he watched Shawn slowly drift up to consciousness, something Eliot hadn’t gotten to see in far too long, what with the complications of his hectic pre-leave schedule and all the interruptions during their two whole days of leave back on Earth.

The fact that Shawn, a notoriously late riser, was waking before dawn didn’t surprise Eliot. They’d laid down at least an hour before dusk, and with the planet’s longer cycle—and this hemisphere in the middle of its spring season—the nights were close to 15 hours long. Frankly, Eliot was amazed that Shawn had almost slept through the entire night. _He must have been exhausted,_ Eliot thought a little guiltily, and resolved to take it a little easier on Shawn for the next few days. Just a little, because while there was no real rush—they finally had time to relax away from everyone—the sooner Shawn learned how to evade and escape capture and survive long enough for Eliot to reach him, the better Eliot would feel.

Shawn eventually began his morning half-asleep ritual of squirming around and pulling Eliot in close (with what always felt like more limbs than he should logically have, but Eliot had counted—a few times, after they’d come to Atlantis and he’d realized this was something he might conceivably have to worry about—and Shawn still only had the normal number). Eliot tucked Shawn’s head under his chin, as per his part of the ritual, and murmured, “Morning, sunshine.” It had always been less of a greeting and more of an unwelcome confirmation from a friendly voice, since Shawn was most definitely not a morning person.

Shawn grumbled something into Eliot’s chest (something Eliot had never yet managed to make out, despite the many, many times he’d heard it, but which he strongly suspected was something to the effect of ‘Fuck your morning,’), completing the ritual, and pulled away to stretch widely and starfish out. Doing so landed Shawn out of the protective enclosure of Eliot’s arms and the emergency blanket. Shawn scrambled uncoordinatedly to his feet with a betrayed yelp as soon as he landed on the cold, dew-drenched grass.

Eliot couldn’t hold in his snicker, but Shawn got his revenge by tackling Eliot and rolling him out of the blanket and into the clammy grass, even as Shawn plastered himself against Eliot in an effort to leech away all the body heat he could in an effort to warm back up. Eliot growled playfully and pulled Shawn close. He ignored the way Shawn was scowling and muttering, “Stupid nature. Stupid camping. Hate everything,” to give him a noogie and escalate things.

In the time with he’d been with Shawn, Eliot had discovered—through a lot of trial and error—that the best way to cheer Shawn up on awful, horrible, no-good mornings was a quick and judicious application of caffeine. Barring that, lazy, playful morning sex came in at a close second as a Shawn-mood-enhancer.

And since the only coffee they had with them was instant shit from some ‘just in case’ MREs in their packs, Eliot would prefer to save that for an actual emergency. All the bitching about the subpar quality (from the both of them, Eliot had to admit) was enough in itself to make the caffeine headaches worth it.

Eliot normally kicked morning sex off with a lazy grind of their hips—body language was the language Shawn found easiest to decipher in the mornings, before his brain kicked fully into gear—but this morning it made Shawn stiffen against Eliot in an unanticipated way. Shawn pulled back, every part of him tense, and Eliot abruptly remembered yesterday’s meltdown. _How the hell did I forget it?_ Eliot wondered, annoyed with himself, and figured he had to chalk up his slowness to the long night spent keeping watch, which must have affected him more than he’d realized. He pulled Shawn’s tense body against him, feeling like he was hugging a mannequin, and murmured soothingly, “Hey, no, nothing fancy. Just you and me and getting off together; I remember you need to talk about that shit before we do any of it. I haven’t forgotten. Just ignore yesterday for now–” because Eliot knew that forgetting wasn’t ever an option with Shawn, “–and concentrate on this. Just us. Normal morning.”

“In _nature_ ,” Shawn grumbled, but relaxed into Eliot and let him press them together. “With cold and bugs and grass and _wet_ …” his complaints trailed of into a moan, and he rocked his hips into Eliot’s. _That’s more like it,_ Eliot thought, relieved he hadn’t ruined anything.

Extremely conscious of their limited ability to wash the few clothes they’d grabbed in their rush to get off the city, Eliot quickly fumbled both their flies open and pushed everything down and up far enough that they wouldn’t risk getting come on what they were wearing.

He tangled his fingers with Shawn’s and wrapped their joined hands around both their dicks, making a tunnel soon slick with precome for them to push through, dicks sliding sliding wetly against fingers and each other after a few moments of uncomfortable friction. Eliot pressed his mouth against Shawn’s face, blindly searching for his lips as he tried to keep watching their dicks slide through their hands. He gave up when he found Shawn’s mouth and let his eyes fall closed, kissing him breathlessly as they raced towards orgasm.

They hadn’t had sex in days, despite yesterday’s misadventure, and before the feast of fucking on Earth, before they’d been recalled, it’d been a long period of famine as Eliot stacked shifts and missions on top of one another in an effort to build up the goodwill of his fellow soldiers before he ran off to another galaxy and left them to cover for him. In other words, Eliot’s body had a lot of pent-up arousal that it’d only begun to work through in Santa Barbara, and he was close. So close.

Shawn came before him, as was usual.

Shawn’s hair trigger was something that worked for them, though, since unlike Eliot, Shawn always seemed to get just as much out of sex after coming as he did before. Eliot had learned quickly that Shawn really enjoyed the tingly pleasure-pain of oversensitivity that sparked through him whenever and wherever he was touched after orgasm. Shawn could even occasionally dry-orgasm just a few minutes after coming, if Eliot started soon enough and kept at it long enough, stroking Shawn up and down his sides and around his shoulders and trailing fingers lightly down his neck and back and limbs.

Eliot, on the other hand, could barely stand being touched immediately after orgasm, and usually took at least a minute to come back down far enough that Shawn’s cuddling tendencies didn’t make him want to cringe away. He’d learned to deal, though, since Shawn tended to need the comfort of post-sex snuggles immediately afterwards more than Eliot needed to not be touched.

Eliot stroked them together a few more times, before Shawn’s soft sighs and hazy smile and wetness slicking Eliot’s hand was enough to push Eliot over the edge. He groaned as he came, and grunted when Shawn immediately plastered himself against Eliot.

He briefly considered Shawn’s command to safeword out of anything that made him uncomfortable, but dismissed the thought quickly. He was growing to almost enjoy the way it felt like he was winning a knock-down, drag-out fight with himself each and every time he managed to suffer through Shawn’s post-sex snuggles until Eliot could bear being touched again. He liked the way that forcing himself to endure that minute of uncomfortable closeness got easier each and every time he did it.

It was a little like back when he’d first started boot camp as a teenager. It had been agony—the same with Ranger School and SERE School—but by the end of it his body could do everything he told it to do, and do it better than everyone else. _I’m the one in charge, not my body, and I’m going to make make it like post-sex snuggles. My body will adjust, learn to deal, just like it always has before,_ Eliot told himself firmly. He then decided to never, ever mention to Shawn that he’d just equated snuggling with boot camp. He’d never hear the end of it. Especially since he wasn’t entirely certain whether it would be because Shawn was mocking him or because Shawn was yelling at him. (At least the first comparison that had popped up in his mind wasn’t torture. Eliot didn’t know if he would have been able to convince himself it was a learning experience if every time Shawn  hugged him close Eliot remembered multiple broken bones and a dark, humid room in Djakarta.)

Eventually Eliot’s aversion to touch faded, the way it always did, and he could enjoy the sweaty warmth of Shawn pressed up against him—at least until the sun rose entirely and the planet’s sudden swarm of dawn- and dusk-loving insects filled the clearing. They weren’t bloodsuckers like Earth’s mosquitoes, but the Athosians had discovered that they swarmed messes (just like Earth’s flies did), and that if they sat too long on human skin they left a nasty rash. Not wanting to cut their leave short again, especially not for an embarrassing trip to Carson for genital rashes, Eliot gave Shawn a quick kiss and gently pushed him off so Eliot could clean himself up with a handful of dew-damp grass and put his clothes to rights.

Shawn followed suite and looked around the clearing, much more awake now than he’d been half an hour ago. “I’m guessing that all of yesterday’s drama hasn’t changed your mind about the Basic Training: Offworld thing,” Shawn said with resignation, before brightening considerably. “You know, that’s a reality show I think Earth needs. None of the edited-for-drama and ‘voted off the island’ bullshit, they could fight for their lives against the wilds of an alien planet, and we could vote the failures off the entire fucking _planet_. Much more dramatic than Survivor, especially if you throw them through a gate with the address blurred out at the end of the voting.”

“And I’m guessing that you’re about to volunteer to be voted off the planet for the good of the show and have to force yourself to accept the consolation prize of a private beach with attached five-star hotel?” Eliot asked, raising his eyebrows mockingly and not letting himself get sucked into Shawn’s responding argument.

It was maybe a little deceptive—or a lot—but sometimes the best way to convince Shawn to do something was to encourage him to go off on tangents and get so wrapped up in his head that he no longer noticed what his body was doing. For instance, while Shawn continued to expand on his ‘Survivor: MP4-666’ idea, he’d started emptying out their packs and sorting the equipment into piles. Eliot assumed the names of the piles, judging from what he could see of them, would end up being something like: “Useful,” “Maybe useful, don’t pack again immediately,” “For emergencies, pack away neatly so everything’s easy to access,” and “Oh hell no, set it on fire and throw it in the latrine.” Eliot couldn’t really argue with how every single ‘only if literally dying of starvation’ Veggie Omelette MRE the quartermaster had pushed on Eliot over his stay in Atlantis had ended up on the ‘burn to death’ pile. He didn’t think anyone would. (The Veggie Omelette MREs, called ‘vomelets’ by most of the soldiers Eliot had served with, always ended up in his Go Bag by default of being the only ones he couldn’t bring himself to eat on missions.)

As Shawn rambled and absentmindedly sorted and checked their gear, Eliot stayed within earshot and kept egging him on whenever it sounded like he was starting to lose interest in the topic. He worked his way around the clearing, building noise traps and collecting material for a sturdy lean-to, and hoped that Shawn somehow wouldn’t notice that their packs were distinctly lacking in anything tent-like. When Shawn started pausing longer and longer between each point he was making, Eliot knew a new distraction was in order soon unless he wanted to spend the rest of the day arguing about tents they didn’t even have.

Eliot had finished his makeshift alarm system and had a decent pile of material for the lean-to, so he began pulling up sod in the center of the clearing. He was almost positive that they didn’t have to worry about forest fires now, in the middle of a very green spring, but it was always better to teach good habits.

“What’s so bad about editing reality footage for drama, anyway? At least it makes shitty television more entertaining,” he called over to Shawn, trusting that the enraging comment would drag Shawn over to Eliot to argue his point all up close and personal. It did. Eliot could frankly care less about reality TV, considering he didn’t even watch the news unless he was stuck on a hospital bed with nothing else to do. It was a waste of time that he could spend doing something productive, and more often than not, he could get faster and more accurate news straight from the source, or through his connections with someone on the ground.

But it was one of those things he knew from experience that Shawn could rant about passionately and at length. And usually, when that happened– Yep. Shawn’s brain was so occupied with what he was talking about that his hands automatically started following Eliot’s lead, cutting deep into the sod and pulling it up in square(ish, since regular lines in the dirt were a rookie mistake) pieces and setting it aside, so a small campfire could be quickly extinguished and covered and leave little trace for anyone to find. Useful, if you were on the run.

Shawn’s brain was a marvel, and Eliot knew that he’d remember this if he ever needed it, even if he didn’t know he was learning it—so the longer Eliot could keep Shawn distracted and continue with this stealth-pseudo-SERE training, the happier they’d both be.

Shawn started winding down on the editing-for-drama rant, and Eliot cursed himself for tuning it out—he probably could have made it last at least another half an hour with a few carefully-chosen comments. Time for a new topic—and a new project, considering the firepit was beginning to approach the size Eliot might need to roast a small boar whole, if he felt the urge.

“You said something about Kinky Sex 101 yesterday,” Eliot said, purposefully casual, when Shawn stopped talking to look down at his hands, his eyebrows pinching together in confusion.

Shawn jerked his eyes up to Eliot, who raised his eyebrows questioningly. “You need safewords for ‘roleplaying’ even though no one’s getting hurt?” Eliot prompted. He wasn’t dumb—he’d gotten the gist of what Shawn had been saying yesterday, enough to extrapolate most of what he probably needed to know. But if playing stupid got Shawn talking–

“Nope,” Shawn said, oddly cheerful.

Eliot was… confused. Shawn had seemed really gung-ho about the topic yesterday.

“No,” Shawn repeated. “That’s a conversation I want you to concentrate on, and don’t think I don’t know you’re tuning me out right now.”

Eliot grimaced, caught. Shawn made it so easy to forget—and even though Eliot knew better, he almost always fell for it—that there was a genius mind lurking behind every extravagant gesture and ridiculous comment.

“Why not squares, anyway? This way you have to fit them back together like a puzzle, which would take longer if you were in a hurry,” Shawn asked, looking down at what his hands were doing with that quizzical pinch of his eyebrows again. Eliot pulled Shawn away from the firepit and to the edge of the clearing to demonstrate rather than give him an answer to argue with.

The edge of the clearing would be quicker to cover any marks they left with woodland detritus (which was why the lean-to would eventually be erected nearer the trees than Eliot would prefer in a perfect world), so it was a good place to demonstrate and not mar the clearing for future use. He cut precise angles into the sod, pulling up perfect cubes of dirt and grass and leaving a pit measuring around two square feet and roughly eight inches deep. Halfway through, his knife started making the same awful screech fingernails did on a chalkboard as the blade ground against a large rock just a little deeper under the soil than the pit Eliot was making. He regretted the dulling of the blade, but he was making a point more than a pit, here, and didn’t want to make one side of the hole shallower than the other. He started to replace the sod, gesturing speakingly to the the abrupt edges of each brick of sod and the lines they made in the grass even after they’d been replaced; nature didn’t tend towards right angles or straight lines, so they stood out and caught the eye.

“Wait, stop,” Shawn said suddenly, grabbing Eliot’s arm and preventing him from replacing the last few sod bricks. Eliot sighed, exasperated. If Shawn was going to argue when there was empirical proof _right in front of him_ – “No, yeah, I got it, thanks for the Show and Tell,” Shawn said absentmindedly, and pulled a couple of the bricks back out of the pit, leaning closer to peer at something at the bottom of the hole.

“Dig there,” Shawn said suddenly, excited, pointing to the far side of the square pit Eliot had cut. Shawn dashed back to the center of the clearing to grab the big knife he’d used to help Eliot cut sod for the firepit, dashing back (with the knife sheathed and held properly, Eliot was relieved to note) to start in on the opposite side of the pit of where Eliot was supposed to be digging.

Bemused, Eliot obeyed. Shawn would explain in a minute, he was sure, and he wanted to know what had gotten Shawn so amped up all of a sudden. They’d only been digging for a few minutes when Shawn sat back and wiped his hands ineffectually on his dirt-smeared pants.

“Holy shit,” Shawn breathed quietly, staring into the considerably larger trapezoidal hole they’d made of the small square pit Eliot had started.

“Holy shit what?” Eliot asked, stopping. He was nearly beside himself with curiosity now, and really wanted that explanation.

Shawn gestured wildly at the bottom of the hole. “You don’t see it? Seriously, El, for someone who remarks on the ‘very distinctive something-or-other’ of every single fucking thing in the universe, you don’t notice much.” He threw himself down on his chest and started brushing the dirt away from the big rock Eliot’s knife had kept scraping against as they dug. The shape of the rock revealed aptly proved Eliot’s earlier point, because as Shawn brushed the dirt away, its straight lines and precise angles became glaringly apparent. “See?” Shawn asked excitedly, and Eliot was beginning to.

Eliot leaned in to join Shawn in uncovering the rest of the stone. Like Shawn had just said, it had a very distinctive– Eliot scrubbed at the center of the stone, but there was no engraving. He sat back, frowning thoughtfully.

“What?” Shawn asked, confused.

“There’s no glyph,” Eliot explained. “The rock is same shape as the ones with the glyphs on Milky Way ‘gates, and seems to be the same kind of stone from what I can tell–” Eliot had done his offworld training while they were at the SGC, so he’d seen a few, “–and not the metal of our Pegasus ‘gates—but the Milky Way ‘gates glyphs are carved into the stone, they don’t light up from underneath like the Pegasus ‘gate glyphs do. And I’ve never seen or heard of a ‘gate with blank stones.” Was this something no one in the SGC had seen before?

“This is so _cool_ ,” Shawn breathed, “I feel like Doctor Jackson.” He scrambled to his feet and started dashing back across the clearing, and Eliot just knew he was aiming for the ‘For emergencies’ bag Shawn had put together earlier.

Eliot lunged for him and managed to grab an ankle, tripping Shawn and bringing him crashing roughly to the ground. “Nuh-uh,” Eliot grunted, then quickly moved to pin Shawn down when it looked like he was just going to get back up and head straight for the radio, too excited to take the time to listen. “No, Shawn, hold up. Think a second. If you call it in, what’s going to happen?”

“Uh, everyone will know how awesome I am—we are—and I’ll finally get to _name_ something?” he said like it was obvious, giving Eliot his patented ‘I know you’re not stupid, so why do you keep acting like it,’ look.

“And?” Eliot asked patiently.

“And I can shove it up the dumb asses of the dumbass low-level scientists on the city who treat me like shit?” Shawn asked with raised eyebrows, clearly not picking up what Eliot was putting down.

Eliot sighed, “And they’ll all come rushing out to see it and we’ll be stuck in meetings and labs for the next week–”

“–and our leave will be cut short _again_ ,” Shawn finished with a groan. “Okay, yeah, understood,” he agreed, wriggling out from under Eliot. Eliot let him go, convinced now that he wasn’t going to run for the radio at his first opportunity.

“We should tell them,” Eliot agreed, “but not till we’re ready to go back to work. It’s not urgent, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s not going to activate while it’s buried.” Just in case, though, Eliot resolved to shift the still-to-be-built lean-to’s placement slightly into the woods surrounding the buried stargate—which explained why the clearing was so perfectly circular—and out of a potential kerwoosh’s area of effect.

“Yep,” Shawn confirmed, then clapped his hands briskly. “So, since we’ve got all this free time to fill before we’re Atlantis-famous, you said wanted the Kinky Sex 101, right?” he asked with a mischievous grin.

He was cornered, and there was no escape. Eliot had brought this on himself. “I did say that,” he sighed, resigned to his fate. The thought of just sitting and talking for as long as Eliot imagined Shawn could go on about the topic in question made Eliot itch with the urge to run for the radio himself, just to put it off longer.

***

Eliot had managed to argue his way into sparring while they discussed the many intricate and varied ins and outs of “newb-friendly basic BDSM,” as Shawn kept calling it. It lasted until the sun was high in the sky and they were soaked with sweat, but Eliot was impressed with how quickly Shawn picked up basic hand-to-hand skills, as well as his instinctive ability at escaping holds.

He’d bet that Shawn’s crazy brain had picked up a few things from Ronon and some of the soldiers on base without even knowing it while Eliot had been on mission after mission and Shawn had been at loose ends. Shawn had probably wandered through the gym a lot when he was playing hooky from his ‘work’ as the lab lightswitch, so Shawn wouldn’t snap and kill most of the science division with the next Ancient hand grenade they asked him to hold on to just a little bit longer. (Oh yes, Eliot had heard about the incident with the grenade, and he’d had quite a few things to say about it himself to the scientists in question—including McKay, for letting them onto the city at all. Setting McKay on them and sitting back to watch the show had been even more satisfying than doing the yelling himself.)

Shawn collapsed to the ground, panting heavily, and Eliot didn’t himself say anything about the necessity of stretching after a hard workout. Shawn either knew and was ignoring it, or would learn soon enough. Eliot joined him on the ground, not breathing hard at all—it had been a good workout, but he was used to harder; his muscles weren’t even complaining—and turned his face up to the sun, eyes closed. He was sweaty and too hot, but the slight breeze was cooling him off enough to enjoy relaxing into the warm pressure of the sun’s rays.

“So,” Shawn said, after he’d caught his breath, “any questions?” Shawn hadn’t had the breath to continue his lesson for the past half hour, but Eliot didn’t try to prevaricate.

“I’m good,” he said. Eliot flopped a hand in Shawn’s direction without opening his eyes when Eliot heard him take a breath to argue. “For now, I’m good,” Eliot repeated himself. He had a few questions, of course, but he was all talked out for the moment. “Anything I’ve got questions about I’ll hold back on till I ask and you answer,” he explained. “No more talking, please. I’m all learned out.”

“I don’t get to use that excuse, so I don’t see why I should let you,” Shawn grumbled under his breath just loud enough that Eliot would definitely make it out, but Shawn didn’t press the issue further. That was one of the many reasons Eliot loved him: Shawn was great at figuring out for himself the little everyday things Eliot needed, without Eliot having to tell him, and just gave them to him without making a fuss about it.

Right. That was probably something that Shawn wanted and needed in a partner just as much as Eliot did. External validation was something Shawn had mentioned an hour or so ago, in that offhand way that Eliot knew meant it was important. That—and the way Eliot knew Shawn sometimes needed someone to tell him things he already knew in order to let him confirm the things he’d deduced—prompted Eliot to reach out and nudge whatever part of Shawn was closest (Shawn’s hand, lying on the grass between them, though Eliot didn’t open his eyes to check) and say plainly and clearly, “I love you.”

It was hard to say without the heat of the moment giving him confidence, and even harder to say it first rather than say it back, but Eliot made himself do it. He felt his face flushing and kept his eyes closed, but he was close enough to hear the barely-audible sharp breath that came from Shawn’s direction.

“Love you too,” Shawn said softly, his voice barely more than a whisper, and brushed his fingers against Eliot’s.


	23. In which idiots who make impulsive and dangerous life choices are obviously destined for each other

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's some talking, and some excitement, and some reconsideration of presuppositions.

HERMIONE

The meeting with Colonel Sheppard had been… _‘Intense’ would be the word for it,_ Hermione decided, stepping out of the transporter and onto the east pier.

Colonel Sheppard had obviously been concerned about his son, but he hadn’t tried to deny what Hermione and Major Morris were telling him about their suspicions regarding Jesse’s accidental magic. That was a nice change for Hermione, someone in a position of power not trying to tell her she was wrong simply because they didn’t like what she was telling them and _wanted_ her to be wrong.

He’d ordered medical tests for confirmation, of course, but Hermione would have done so as well. And immediately after the meeting, Colonel Sheppard had taken Major Morris to see Jesse so they could tell him about what they suspected right away. He’d gone to tell his son right away, rather than keeping his son in the dark because he wanted to protect him, and he’d not once said anything about how Jesse was ‘just a child who shouldn’t have to concern himself with things like this.’

Hermione had come out of the meeting wishing that the adults during her fraught childhood had been more like Colonel Sheppard.

Especially since it was still difficult for Hermione to remember to keep her remarks to Rowena silent, which would have damaged her credibility with even her favorite childhood mentors. Colonel Sheppard hadn’t used that to discredit her at all, nor had he even remarked on it. Possibly because he had been in the same position at some point with Atlantis, but Hermione had known plenty of others with Colonel Sheppard’s authority to whom the similarity in circumstance wouldn’t have been a consideration at all when confronted with unwanted information.

Of course Rowena had been quick to show Hermione how to speak without, well, speaking, when they’d first met, but it was difficult for Hermione. She was so used to speaking out loud rather than mentally that it was easy to forget all too often.

Speaking to Rowena in her head was a little easier when she stopped thinking of Rowena as a person, and instead just treated her like another of the imaginary clones of her friends she kept in her head to bounce things off of before saying them out loud, or with whom she had imaginary conversations when she was missing their originals too much (it sounded bonkers, but Hermione was almost certain it was a thing that everyone did). But that devalued Rowena as a person, so she tried to keep herself from doing it. _Just because Rowena’s body is a spaceship didn’t mean she isn’t a person,_ Hermione thought fiercely as soon as she imagined Ron’s reaction to an alien spaceship being a person.

 **Thank you, dear,** Rowena replied, her mental tone amused.

Hermione flushed, but laughed with Rowena inside her head. **I know,** Hermione formed her thought carefully, **I’m crafting my arguments before anyone’s even brought it up. But it’s better to be prepared just in case it happens, isn’t it?**

 **You don’t have to shout, dear, I can hear you just fine. And yes, it is prudent to be prepared, especially since from what I’ve seen of humans in your mind, it will become an issue at some point. But we do have more relevant problems to worry about at the moment,** Rowena sighed. Hermione sent back wordless agreement, remembering the awkward meeting with the entirety of Atlantis’s command staff she’d just escaped from. **And, of course, I’m referring to your impulsive strong one in addition to everything else,** Rowena added with sly humor, and Hermione blushed hotly at the pointed reminder of Mal– Major Morris. Drake.

He’d been calm and collected during the meeting, despite the disbelief and shouting his observations and speculation about Jesse’s accidental magic had prompted. It was a far cry from the stumbling, stuttering mess he’d been fifteen minutes prior to the meeting, when he’d dashed out of Rowena like she was collapsing around them. Major– Drake. They’d fucked, so Hermione figured it was high time she started to use his first name. Drake had changed so much from the boy she’d thought she’d known in school that she’d come to doubt she’d ever actually known him at all.

Treating him as a brand new person, rather than the boy she’d once thought she’d had figured out, had led to one of the quickest and closest friendships she’d ever formed—barring Harry and Ron—despite the strange way he always seemed to be looking in on everything from a great distance.

 **I know the type,** Rowena agreed.

Hermione took the last few steps of her brief walk from the transporter and climbed back inside Rowena. Every time she passed through Rowena’s door she felt like nothing could ever hurt her. Rowena felt like the safest place she’d ever been ever since she’d left her mother’s womb.

It was disconcerting, but in a nice way, and Hermione relaxed the last bit of tension she’d always felt when outside or around people, tension she hadn’t even known she’d carried until that very first time she stepped through Rowena’s door.

 **Are we ready to go now? My strong impulsive injured one–** names didn’t really translate all that well, but Hermione could tell that Rowena was mostly using the same mishmash of concepts that she’d described Drake with, and she found herself smiling for no reason, **–will receive the assistance required from my brethren, but I would prefer to be there myself and see–** another flash of the Drake-But-Not-Drake name concept **–safely into orbit.**

 **Yes, of course,** Hermione agreed, directing her thought toward the space she felt Rowena to be in her mind, concentrating so hard on not shouting that she felt a headache forming. **I just need to let the city know that I’m leaving, and we can go. They know about Jesse now, and there’s not much we can do until medical tests confirm and give credence to our suspicions. Nothing, in fact, that I can do either way until Colonel Sheppard gets off his ass and gets me my clearances.** Hermione was briefly horrified at how her thought had come out, without the built-in ability to censor herself the way she could when she thought before she spoke. _Thinking before you think is much more difficult,_ she despaired.

A wave of amusement washed over her, carrying the fizzy breathless joy of a good fit of giggles straight to the limbic system of her brain. **This is a ‘judgement-free zone,’** Rowena laughed at her, but not meanly. **I won’t ever think worse of you for the things you think, only for the things you act on when you know they’re wrong. Excessive policing of thoughts leads to a stagnant society and self-harm of the individuals within it—and we would know, considering our society is telepathic and lacking the ability to remain solitary in our thoughts. My business is my business, yours is yours, others’ is the concern of others’, and while we know everything about everyone else’s business, it isn’t something that concerns us. Consider it…** Rowena seemed to ponder for a moment, **Consider it like when your friends are drunk and babbling. You don’t pay attention to what they’re saying or what they’re telling you, even though you can hear and understand it, because you know that it is information that they hadn’t intended to impart to you when sober.**

Hermione was beginning to understand. **I see,** she agreed. “Back on topic,” she said aloud, because she was alone now and it was easier—and it helped her to believe that Rowena was real and not just in her head, which was difficult sometimes when their thoughts tended, in general, to run along such similar lines. “How different are your systems? Will you have any difficulty in sending a transmission to Atlantis’s Tower?”

“I will be able to make do,” Rowena replied aloud, making Hermione shriek and jump. Rowena snickered audibly.

“How long have you been able to do that?” Hermione demanded, not sure whether she should be annoyed or amused. She had felt, just for a moment, like the Weasley twins—twin, she supposed now, sadly—were up to their old tricks again.

“Perhaps a few hours. It took me some time to grow the speakers now threaded throughout my interior, as well as their accompanying support system, and to connect it to the right part of my– my ‘brain,’ I guess you could call it,” Rowena replied soothingly. “I decided it might be best not to show off my new components while you had company this morning,” she added slyly.

Hermione’s fading blush resurged, and she was beginning to suspect that Rowena’s sly additions were something she would have to get used to quickly, if she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life blushing. “But why do it at all?” Hermione asked, trying to get Rowena off the topic of Drake.

“So you can stop giving the both of us migraines when we talk, dear,” Rowena said, her remarkably human-sounding voice filled with fond exasperation. “I don’t know why you insist on making it more difficult than it is. This way, though, until it comes more easily to you, our conversations can stay pain-free.”

Hermione flushed with embarrassment this time, and tried to push down the shame that was trying to flood her at being called out on her inability to do something well. “I’ll learn. I’m clever, I know I can,” she said fiercely.

“I don’t doubt it, my dear,” Rowena soothed her. “That wasn’t a ‘jab.’ Letting it come naturally rather than trying to force it will be easier on the both of us, but mostly on you. I find it much more enjoyable to share my thoughts with you when I know it isn’t causing you pain.” Hermione relaxed, and rested a hand fondly on Rowena’s nearest wall. “Now, I believe it’s time to give the Tower a good startle, don’t you think? Would you like to listen?” Rowena asked mischievously, opening a channel to the Tower. She piped it through her speakers for Hermione to hear, and had begun speaking with them before Hermione had time to say anything.

 _I really doubt the telepathy will be the sole source of my headaches, with you,_ Hermione thought wryly, not even attempting to censor herself, and clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter when the Tower’s alarmed response filled Rowena’s interior. _Not that I can honestly say that I won’t be amused,_ she added to herself, and smiled against her hand at the defiant glee bubbling inside of her, an emotion knew had originated with a certain someone else.

“Off we go then!” Rowena said suddenly, and Hermione sat abruptly on the floor— _Some furniture might be nice, eventually,_ she thought ruefully, _even though it seems a bit rude to bring things in and set them up inside someone else_ —as Rowena began to shake and vibrate around her.

“Are we taking off? Should I scrunch up in a corner and try to hold on?” Hermione asked worriedly as the shaking seemed to get worse.

“Oh, no, you’ll be fine,” Rowena said lightly. “It’s just the gravity well—why we try to avoid landing on planets, you know—the first jump in escaping it is always the most difficult.” True to her words, the shaking was already beginning to settle down.

“What was the hurry, anyway? That seemed rather abrupt,” Hermione commented, pulling herself back to her feet.

Rowena flipped down a screen Hermione hadn’t known Rowena had, displaying Atlantis’s rapidly shrinking east pier. _Perhaps a part of the ‘support system’ she’d mentioned earlier,_ Hermione thought.

“Indeed,” Rowena agreed, not sounding the least bit chagrinned. “I wanted to avoid any other delays,” she said, and Hermione finally made out the tiny uniformed figure standing by the transporter and looking after them as they rose into the sky, one hand shading his eyes from the sun turning his hair a blinding white-gold.

Hermione caught the edge of Rowena’s thought, **–strong impulsive injured stupid–** and remembered that Rowena’s friend had been limping into the system the whole time they’d spent dallying on the pier, and the whole night and day before when Hermione had delayed her by insisting that her own problems were more important.

“No, no, dear. I’m sure vee will be fine, and my brethren are more than capable. I just need to see for myself, you know how it is,” Rowena said soothingly. “Your problems were equally as important, and more immediate. You didn’t push me into staying, dear.”

Hermione relaxed, even though she knew Rowena was masking some very real worry, and let herself be distracted by her curiosity. “Vee, is that his—or her—name? Your strong impulsive friend?”

“No,” Rowena said slowly, like she was treading unfamiliar water. Flying unfamiliar skies? _I’m going to have to get some new metaphors, ones that a spaceship will be more likely to comprehend,_ Hermione made a mental note.

“Like the strong impatient child said, we don’t have… gender, you call it? Or sex? The difference isn’t clear to me. But whatever it is that provokes you to refer to people as ‘him’ or ‘her.’ But the strong child has begun referring to us individually, when not by concept-impression-name,” Rowena ran all the words together like they were one thing, which Hermione guessed they might be to the Leviathan, “as ‘vee, vey, veys, and veir,’ I suppose as a play on his—her?—initial mispronunciation of Leviathan. Though it doesn’t make any difference to me if you use female pronouns when referring to me,” Rowena hastily reassured Hermione.

“Jesse is a ‘he,’ though it’s true that the name can be used for either sex or any gender,” Hermione confirmed absently, having to take a moment to absorb the concept of a genderless society.

That prompted Rowena to question the difference between sex and gender, but the longer Hermione explained, the more she only seemed to confuse Rowena. Finally, Hermione told Rowena to ignore her previous attempt, and simplified as much as she could, summarizing, “There are two sexes, and while they can be changed by science or magic, humans are—with rare exceptions—born as one or the other. The majority of humans consider their sex and gender to be one and the same, which is called being cisgendered.

“Gender is a bit more complicated. There are more than two genders, and they don’t always reflect the sex of the person in question. I suppose it’s like how a square is always a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square.” Hermione hoped that had made sense to a being with absolutely no frame of reference. Though, the more she thought about that metaphor, the less sense it made, so she moved on quickly before Rowena, still quietly processing what Hermione had said, questioned it. Besides, this next part would likely come up eventually, so she might as well give Rowena the basics, “Oh, and also, only intercourse between a fertile born-as-female and a fertile born-as-male—who haven’t had surgical or magical intervention to change their genetically determined sex—has the possibility to result in reproduction, though neither intercourse nor romantic feelings of love and affection are limited to just between said males and females.”

“That… seems very complicated,” Rowena said slowly.

“I suppose it is, yeah,” Hermione agreed. “A lot of our home planet is still having trouble figuring a lot of it out.” Hermione sighed. She changed the subject away from that depressing topic before Rowena could ask about it and make Hermione dwell on the stupidity of her species. “Something I don’t understand, though, is how your species reproduces without differentiated sexes. Is it like amoebas, do you bud off a clone?” Hermione flushed, embarrassed, when she realized how intimate the question she’d just asked was. “I’m sorry if that’s intrusive.” Apparently she needed to work on thinking before she spoke as well as thinking before she thought.

Rowena laughed. “Dear, I just asked you essentially the same question, it’s fine. We don’t clone ourselves—I suppose it might be possible, but I don’t see why or how we would. Two or more partners decide to reproduce, and contribute genetic specimens to the partner who volunteers to gestate the child, which are placed in our growth chamber. The child forms from the combined contributed material.”

Hermione boggled. On the surface it might seem simple, but the logistics of offspring being the result of more than two parents, never mind that the numbers seemed to vary case by case– Even just the way their genes must be so alien to everything Hermione knew, alone– Hermione shook it off before she fell down the rabbit hole. “Oh, well. I don’t doubt we’ll discuss this again, especially if Carson has his say, but–”

“But we have more pressing issues right now,” Rowena agreed. “And I believe we’ll catch one of them up in just a few hours.”

***

Rowena needed to concentrate on flying, as she was redlining her engines in an area the Leviathan discovered to be full of micrometeoroids and space debris on their way to Atlantis, and Hermione hadn’t wanted to distract her with conversation. As much as she’d wished she had brought a book or something else to occupy herself with, her unobtrusive beaded bag remained sadly lacking in entertainment. (She was _not_ going to play solo Exploding Snap on a sentient being’s skin.)

When Hermione had packed for her trip through the wormhole to Atlantis, it had been for a brief political visit and a few possible emergencies she’d imagined, not an extended stay. (She’d been glad of the emergency toiletries, as well as her emergency pants and the pair of pyjamas that had always lived at the bottom of the bag, but after that first day she’d had to go begging to Atlantis’s quartermaster—who was actually a very kind and generous man—and had since been fully kitted out in an assortment of spare uniforms from each of the city’s departments, as well as the plain black BDUs she found herself in now.)

And as much as Hermione wanted to experiment with magic while inside someone whose species was, she posited, from a shared alien dimension, Hermione and Rowena hadn’t gotten around to that while on Atlantis, and she doubted very much that the current situation was the appropriate time for that. As it was, the only escape from boredom Hermione had had that didn’t involve possibly distracting Rowena from what she was doing (like exploring her interior would have, because Hermione knew she’d end up thinking her questions so loudly Rowena couldn’t help but hear) had been sleep.

The rattling groans of Rowena’s superstructure were what woke Hermione.

“What’s that noise?” Hermione asked, alarmed, waking quickly and dragging herself to her feet. “Are you alright? Did you get hit by space debris, or one of those micro meteors?

“I’m fine,” Rowena reassured her, sounding distracted. “It’s from the pressure on my connections to vey. A number of us have anchored ourselves to vey, so vee wouldn’t have to use veys engines and compound veys injuries any more than vee already has.”

 _Oh, that’s going to get confusing,_ Hermione thought, mentally translating the pronouns. She made a note to ask Jesse about it later, on the off chance he’d mocked up a chart or something she could use as a quick reference. “So you’re towing him—sorry, vey?—behind the lot of you?”

“In a way, yes. We’re not towing him on lines, like you’re imagining—we’ve tethered ourselves with the magnetic fields we’ve altered our hulls to emit, and it’s quite complicated matching our fields and velocities so precisely, which is why it’s straining my superstructure despite the lack of drag from veys mass after we reached cruising velocity,” Rowena said. Hermione didn’t take it as a reprimand, since the mental bleed-over of Rowena’s speech—despite Rowena speaking through her speakers—made it clear that the exasperation coloring her voice was directed toward her brethren rather than Hermione.

“Arguing over how to do it best?” Hermione asked wryly, knowing the feeling.

“Exactly,” Rowena sighed. “Sometimes they just won’t listen. However, I can—now that we’ve reached a rough approximation of our mean cruising velocity—calculate our estimated time of arrival back in orbit to be something around 11.2 hours, as you measure time,” she said cheerfully. “And I won’t have to concentrate as much as I needed to before, considering our much decreased velocity, so you won’t be bored!”

***

Eleven hours was a long time, regardless of the entertainment available in experimenting with how magic affected Rowena (Hermione found that she could cast faster and with less effort, but they agreed that further experimentation should be conducted later, when they could manufacture a controlled environment.) and exploring her many cavernous (though primarily empty) chambers.

A very long time, when your travelling partner hadn’t realized the demands of your body were ‘often’ and ‘many.’ Hermione was very glad of the couple of powerbars she found in the dark recesses of her beaded bag, as well as the discovery that the Aguamenti charm didn’t affect Rowena at all.

Having to banish a few bodily functions from a corner of one of Rowena’s back rooms was one of the most embarrassing times in Hermione’s life, and Rowena promised fervently that she’d already begun growing a septic system and assorted plumbing. They vowed to never speak of it again, and to consult with the appropriate engineers as soon as they returned to Atlantis. Because, as Hermione pointed out, it would be best for Rowena to have the ability to take on water from outside sources and dispose of waste remotely, rather than wasting the energy needed to make and process it, respectively, herself.

Rowena complained about all the bodily modifications it would require, but Hermione reminded her that they were on their way to becoming the innovators to whom every subsequent Leviathan would refer when following in their footsteps. When that didn’t work, she tried some show and tell with her pierced ears, and explained about body piercing and tattoos and all the other forms of body modification she could think of.

To Hermione’s consternation, Rowena was much more fascinated with the concept of decorative bodily modification than the practical sort. She began experimenting right then and there, which was an interesting experience for Hermione, to say the least.

At least Hermione got a place to sit out of it.

***

Once Rowena and her brethren had achieved a stable orbit around Atlantis’s planet, they disconnected from each other and their limping friend with more very distressing groans of Rowena’s hull and other parts of her superstructure. Rowena repeatedly reassured Hermione that everything was fine, but Hermione couldn’t help being nervous.

Rowena contacted the Tower and requested permission to land on the east pier, something she apparently hadn’t done the first time. “You’re lucky no trigger-happy soldiers were on duty that day, or you’d have been shot down,” Hermione muttered, confident Rowena would hear her. “You just up and landed on the east pier with no warning? Drake thought you were sinking the city, so I can only imagine what the Tower thought.”

“Exactly how much mass do you think I have?” Rowena asked, offended. “It’s not like we’re naturally the size of those genetically-altered monstrosities the Wraith torture us into.”

Hermione backed away slowly from the topic. “Of course not.”

“At our very oldest, which we don’t get to be in this dimension, the largest of us was about–” Hermione felt the very odd sensation of someone else quickly and carefully poking at her brain, “–1,500 meters. The largest we tend to get in this dimension, before we get killed or captured by the Wraith, is 300 or so meters. The smallest of the ones you call Wraith Cruisers are almost triple that; and never mind those Hive horrors, more than double Moya’s size and barely a fifth of veys age! Forced growth like that, it’s no wonder those poor things don’t have any mind left. _I_ am only 50 years old, and 71 meters by 42 meters, _thank you very much_ ,” she expounded huffily.

“Right, sorry. I shouldn’t have implied you could have sunk Atlantis,” Hermione said blankly.

“I should think not,” Rowena replied, aggrieved. “She’s 4,500 meters at her widest point if she’s an inch. Meter. Why do you have so many different names for the sizes of things?” she asked, exasperated.

“I have no idea,” Hermione threw up her hands, and changed the subject forcefully. “How is your friend doing? Will vee heal quickly?”

“No,” the tone of Rowena’s voice made Hermione want to burst into tears. “Vee’s damaged too severely to direct his own repairs. We hope that with our assistance, vee may get veys life-support systems patched quickly enough to keep vey stable, but it is only a chance. Vee wasted so much energy on veys weapons systems that vee may not have enough.” Rowena paused, and added quietly, “Vee’s not saying anything. I hope vee didn’t spend all veys energy on reaching us.”

“Can he– vee land? Can we help vey direct his– veys repairs? There must be something we can do!” Hermione wanted to fix this for Rowena. Surely Atlantis had the technology to help!

“I’m afraid–” Rowena broke off. **No! What are you doing?** she asked someone-not-Hermione frantically, the intensity of the question’s overflow still enough to make Hermione’s mind reverberate. **You’ll kill yourself!** Rowena shouted, and then said grimly through her speakers, “Hold on, this is going to be rough.”

Hermione braced herself in a corner. “What’s going on?!” she shouted over the shuddering and groaning of Rowena’s body, which was far worse than escaping the gravity well or towing the injured Leviathan had been.

“Vee decayed veys orbit and is entering the atmosphere at a dangerous angle. I’m catching vey up and tethering vey to me, going to try and make the re-entry less likely to result in a flaming corpse,” Rowena said tersely. “I’ve opened a channel to the Tower, let them know if all goes well we’ll end up on the east pier. If it doesn’t, no one will have to worry,” Rowena said ominously. “I can’t talk and do this at the same time,” she added, and fell silent—except for the way it sounded like her superstructure was shaking itself apart.

“Tower, do you copy?” Hermione asked frantically.

“Tower copy,” someone Hermione didn’t know answered back calmly.

“I need Colonel–” Hermione began.

“Transferring to secure channel now, ma’am,” the woman interrupted her to say, but Hermione just spoke over her.

“We’re coming in– I don’t know, wrong, I guess. The Leviathan we’re attached to is injured and can’t correct course. We’re going to try to make it to the east pier—the Leviathan may be dying, and if you can figure out how to help–”

“The idiot thought vee felt veys bondmate,” Rowena interrupted. “If vee is right, veys bondmate could help direct veys repairs. Get all your ‘wizards’ ready to meet us, just in case. Perhaps, even if vee’s wrong, they may be able to help.”

Colonel Sheppard’s voice finally crackled back over Rowena’s speakers. “Acknowledged. I have some Marines standing by, ready to meet you. How likely is it that you’re going to obliterate us rather than land on us? _He sounds remarkably calm for the situation,_ Hermione thought distractedly.

“Probability at roughly 31 percent and decreasing,” Rowena replied. Hermione couldn’t hear any difference in the sounds Rowena’s superstructure was making, but Rowena sounded more confident and less like she was predicting their gruesome deaths than she had earlier, which was comforting.

The rattling and shaking abruptly fell to silence. “Probability of Atlantis’s obliteration at point two percent and standing,” Rowena suddenly said cheerfully, and then landed hard enough even Hermione felt the thud.

“Thank Merlin,” Hermione muttered.

“Good to hear,” Colonel Sheppard said wryly. “Always good not to be the impact site. Standing by at the transporters. Let us know when we won’t catch on fire just standing next to you and can approach–” he broke off, then bellowed, “ _Fucking–_ Major Morris, get your ass back here! Maj–” before turning off his radio.

Rowena immediately flipped her viewscreen down to show Hermione what was happening on the pier. They watched in mute amazement as Drake dashed from the transporter towards the, what little they could see of him through the distortion of the heat waves coming off Rowena and her friend, and the clouds of steam as the sea water slopping onto the sunken pier immediately evaporated into billowing waves of super-heated steam. Hermione was ready to kill him for this unexpected display of patriarchal bullshit. What the hell was he thinking? The heat alone–

And then she realized he wasn’t heading for Rowena at all, but the Leviathan next to them. She could see, through the heat and the steam the boot prints of melted rubber he was leaving behind him as he ran. He grabbed at something though his uniform blouse without a falter in his stride—His dog tags, Hermione realized—and while Hermione didn’t recognize whatever he’d cast or reinforced through the nearly opaque air between him and Rowena’s camera, he stopped leaving boot prints on the pier and was able to slam himself into the Leviathan without immediately charring all his skin off. Hermione watched, somewhere between horror and disbelief, as Drake clawed at the Leviathan’s surface until an opening appeared, which he immediately threw himself into.

“Impulsive,” Rowena said fondly.

“You must be joking,” Hermione said flatly, disregarding the evidence she’d just seen with her own eyes as an aberration. “ _Drake?_ Drake is the least impulsive–” she broke off under the infodump Rowena laid on her.

 **Became a spy to save his mother with less than a minute’s consideration. Ran to a country he knew nothing about, joined a community he knew nothing about, joined the military of that community with little to no forethought, disowned his disloyal father and changed his name, all within two weeks. Requested a transfer to another galaxy he knew nothing about, because he overheard an officer saying too many soldiers were dying there and he thought he’d be able to help. Just ran across the pier when it was still warping from our heat and vowed to do whatever was in his power to help a perfect stranger.** Rowena dumped fact after fact into Hermione’s head, strangely tinted, like they belonged to someone else. **No, he’s not impulsive at all,** Rowena thought at Hermione sarcastically.

“But– How–?” Hermione asked, clutching at her head and waiting for the information to settle. Some of it she’d known or deduced the generalities of, but most of it was completely new to her.

“He’s pouring so much of his energy into vey right now that they are essentially the same person for this moment,” Rowena said aloud, taking pity on Hermione’s poor brain. “Vee is in the community meld again, and therefore so is a part of your Drake. This is what he is showing vey, in response to veys last battle with the Wraith. Vee attacked impulsively, trying to free veir parent, who had been captured by the Wraith.

“We know vey like vey is ourself, just as all my brethren know each other. These parts of your impulsive one, your Drake, are as much a part of vey as they are of Drake. They will be a good match,” Rowena said simply, happily. “Though the trouble they will get each other in after vee has healed–” she broke off to laugh.

Hermione didn’t know whether to feel happy that Rowena’s friend was going to live, or nervous on behalf of the universe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Jesse's cheat sheet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4704041)


	24. In which 'Here There Be Dragons' is now literal

MORRIS

Drake had mixed feelings about Granger’s abrupt departure immediately after the meeting regarding Jesse’s accidental magic. Okay, yes, he’d wanted to pretend the night before had never happened. (Though not enough to actually flee the planet. Awkward.)

But it was because he didn’t want his friendship with Granger to sour the way his friends-with-benefits situations always, _always_ had in the past. He wished he could be sure that it would be different between them, because he was beginning to believe that Granger might, infuriatingly, be the perfect woman—but Drake knew better. There was just something about him that doomed every one of his intimate relationships to dramatic and horrible endings, and that was why he so regretted his bloody awesome night with Granger.

Drake wished he could tell her that—without actually, you know, telling her that.

He quickly headed back to the east pier just as soon as he’d finished standing around awkwardly while the Colonel had explained the situation to Jesse. (Drake didn’t know why the Colonel had made him come with. Sergeant Markham was currently on duty for Jesse Watch—still in effect, because even though they’d identified Jesse’s accidental magic, it didn’t mean there wouldn’t be more to come—if Colonel Sheppard had just been wanting a fire extinguisher handy.)

Drake was determined to find Granger and see if they could work something out so they’d never have to talk about the whole sex thing. And refrain from having it some more. And just be like they were before, for always— _Or at least for as long as she ends up staying on Atlantis,_ he thought.

He stepped onto the east pier just in time to see Rowena’s thrusters flare to life. Watching her stately, slow rise off the pier would probably have been more impressive from the Tower, and he would have been able to focus on his irritation with Granger’s running away.

As it was, actually standing on the pier with the impressive image, Drake was more concerned with trying to stay on his feet.

Rowena’s slow ascent might have looked graceful from a distance, but Rowena’s deafeningly loud climb into the sky was making the pier was shake and jump under his feet, Rowena’s departure actually rocking Atlantis in the water (even though when compared to Atlantis, Rowena was the size of a bath toy). Because Rowena was rising slowly, every time the pier popped up like a cork her thrusters just pushed it right back down underwater. Drake stumbled backwards until he could lean against the wall holding the transporter for added stability.

Eventually, Rowena was high enough that her thrusters were no longer rebounding off the pier and Atlantis settled in the water. Drake felt as though he’d just been been through an earthquake. Atlantis sent Drake a brief burst of awe mixed with irritation, and he sent back the same, minus the awe but with added affection for the put-upon city.

Drake shaded his eyes with a hand to watch the slow process of Rowena’s considerable mass gaining the velocity she needed to finally shrink away into the atmosphere and disappear with Granger. They didn’t fade as quickly from his thoughts as they did from his sight. He turned and re-entered the city once he realized he’d been staring after them for full minutes since they’d disappeared, because he had work to do.

Somewhere. Probably.

***

Casually loitering in the Control Tower the next morning, after his night shift on Jesse Watch, eventually paid off. Drake was leant on the railing overlooking the ‘Gate room, ostensibly waiting for AR-22’s check-in, when the tech monitoring the scans announced that the group of Leviathan who’d left to fetch their friend was re-entering orbit. Drake even had a few minutes to be quietly pleased that Granger was back, if in orbit rather than on the city.

And then the tech announced, with quickly mounting apprehension, that one of the Leviathan was losing orbit. “If it remains on its current course, it will burn up in the atmosphere. The minor corrections it’s making might let its core last long enough to collide with Atlantis.”

Seconds later, Granger’s panicked voice echoed through the Tower, “I need Colonel Sheppard! “We’re coming in– I don’t know, wrong, I guess. The Leviathan we’re attached to is injured and can’t correct–”

Drake’s heart jumped, even though—or maybe because—she was quickly cut off and transferred to a private channel with Colonel Sheppard, who wasn’t in the Tower. The shield might protect Atlantis, but if Granger hit the shield… But Drake had to do what he could to protect his people on Atlantis, and the city herself. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

“Raise the shield,” Drake bellowed over the noise of the agitated technicians, then beat feet out of the Tower to the nearest transporter. Colonel Sheppard had still been in his quarters this morning when Drake had vacated the couch (practically impossible to sleep on, which Drake supposed was a good thing, seeing as he was supposed to remain alert while on watch) and headed to the Tower. Colonel Sheppard would probably still be in his quarters, considering the way he hated—which was audibly and often—the cane Pasha and Carson had ordered him to use whenever the Colonel left his quarters, ever since Colonel Sheppard had drastically rewound his recovery four of Atlantis’s long days ago.

Drake only had time to knock once on the Colonel’s door before it slid open. The Colonel stepped out of his quarters, saying into his radio, “Acknowledged. I have some Marines standing by, ready to meet you–” He gave Drake a look and mouthed ‘east pier, wizards,’ before returning to whatever he was saying to Granger.

Not lingering to eavesdrop, Drake asked Atlantis to make sure the Colonel knew the shield was up and about-faced, running right back to the transporter. He radioed Markham and Stackhouse on the way and told them to gather all the wizards they knew and rendezvous by the transporter closest to the east pier—that wasn’t the one actually on the pier. (Specificity was key with those two smartasses.) He also ordered a localized evacuation of the area surrounding the east pier, and radioed Colonel Lorne to deliver a quick SITREP—but he was doing all that with only a fraction of his attention.

The majority of his mind was alternating between being terrified for Granger (and Rowena), and fighting against the all-consuming need to be on the east pier right the fuck now, despite knowing it was likely destined to become an impact crater in just a few minutes. He assumed it was because of his horror at the thought that Granger might die horribly very soon and that, illogically, he thought he could do something to stop it.

He assumed wrong.

***

Drake was holding his breath and sprinting across the east pier through clouds of steam that tried to cauterize his lungs as soon as he took a breath.

He didn’t remember how he got here. Was he dreaming?

The metal of the pier’s deck was so hot that it was melting the soles of his combat boots.

Turning back was inconceivable, halting his dash toward the source of the blistering heat impossible. He was beginning to smell singed hair over the reek of hot metal and burned rubber—but the need that he’d thought was consuming him before had lit him into a towering inferno of purpose.

He had to get to that Leviathan before the fire inside him burned him alive, never mind the outside heat blistering his skin. Drake made himself cast a quick Protego, grabbing at his focus object and making himself cast it again and again as the heat battered against the quickly collapsing shields, but he regretted every expenditure of power even as he used it to keep himself alive. He knew that he’d need all the energy he could muster in just a moment, though he didn’t know why.

He didn’t care, though; it didn’t matter. He was at the Leviathan.

Just being there wasn’t helping; he had to get inside. He didn’t know why.

He banged on the hull with his fists and his boots, scratched at it with his fingernails, and slowly an opening began to form. It wasn’t a proper door, just a thinning of the organic material. He didn’t want to add to the ship’s injuries (scorch marks and tears large enough and deep enough that it was a wonder the Leviathan had made it as far as it had), but not enough to stop him from tearing through the skin as soon as it was possible for him to do so—he had to get inside.

He couldn’t help if he was outside.

He had to help.

Squeezing through the opening as soon as it was barely large enough for his shoulders to fit, he fell a few feet and landed on the rough floor of a dark, cavernous room. The only light was what was coming through the rip in the hull he’d fallen from. He’d thought being inside would make what he had to do clear, but none of his urgency had dissipated, and he didn’t know anything more than he had a moment ago.

“Please, let me help. I can help you, I know it. Tell me what to do, I’ll do anything I can. You can’t die,” Drake pleaded with the empty room, climbing to his knees and flattening his hands against the floor, words pouring out of him. “Come on, something. What do I do? How do I help?” He dropped all the barriers he’d created and kept raised against the Leviathan ever since they’d first bombarded his mind in the Jumper.

 **hurt… no energy… exhausted all… wraith...** echoed faintly through Drake’s mind, as if his head were the cavernous room he was kneeling in. The tiny thought didn’t get any clearer or louder, and he only noticed the foreign presence in his mind when it began to fade.

“Take mine, you can have mine,” Drake begged.

 **too much… hurt you…** the whisper argued.

Drake refused to believe he couldn’t help.

He was suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that _this_ was what he was for, why he’d been born. “Too bad. I’m doing it anyway,” he muttered firmly, and pressed his hands harder against the floor, dragging his magic up from the place he hadn’t known it lived until now, somehow pouring the raw energy through his hands and into the skin of the creature he knelt on.

It was agony. It was the purest agony Drake had ever experienced. He’d spent a year as Riddle’s whipping boy, and Riddle had loved his Crucios, but this was worse. Drake was doing this to himself, and he could stop at any time—but he couldn’t. Someone would die if he stopped, and he no longer knew which one of them it would be.

Drake screamed as he poured the very essence of himself into the Leviathan. He could feel his thoughts and memories being sucked after the ebbing riptide of his magic, until he was no longer a _he_ but a _they_.

His body was both five feet seven inches tall and 305 feet two inches tall. His body was singed by the dash across the deck and screaming with the pain of forced energy drain, as well as gouged and torn and scorched by Wraith energy beams and explosions and the impacts of Wraith darts and the trauma of haphazard atmospheric re-entry. His mind was the size of a solar system and filled with the distinct planets and comets of others’ thoughts and emotions.

 **Merlin,** they thought, and all their pain receded to nothing, subsumed by the gravitational mass of their amazement. **I/you/we are an idiot,** they thought, flashes of space battles against the Wraith interspersed with hunting Wraith on land with nothing but stealth, a knife, and a prayer. **But I/you/we survive,** they argued. **I/you/we are clever, impulsive and _also_ planners, loyal, victors,** they congratulated veirself, flashing through memories as proof, remembering spying on Riddle and fleeing to the States when the Daily Prophet commended him for it, commanding raids to free captured brethren, commanding Marines, following right on the ion-trails of Wraith through solar system after solar system, thinking one more Marine might be enough to turn the tide in another galaxy, consumed by sorrow when bombing the site where Wraith were initiating the torture of another Leviathan at veys heart-wrenching request for death, sprinting across the superheated pier, betting it all on one last swan dive through the atmosphere—on a chance they might survive giving a stranger every mote of their life-force.

 **What/who/where is Merlin?** they wondered suddenly, and picked through their memories to explain. They reread books in a fraction of a second: ‘A History of Magic,’ the collection of Welsh legends of Myrddin Wyllt, and the squib Geoffrey of Monmouth’s interpretation of events made legend before even his time. They remembered first discovering the BBCA channel after moving to the States and learning to work a television, and how during their first leave they saw their first episode of BBC’s Merlin. They remembered the bittersweet nostalgia for the familiar anachronisms and accents, and how they spent the rest of that leave plastered to the television, marathoning the entire series. **Oh, I/you/we are _impressed_. This Kilgharrah, these dragons, reality?** they asked, astonished. **Dragons yes. Kilgharrah, talking dragons no,** they explained, remembering their mother explaining the meaning of their birth name, remembering choosing their second name for its similar etymology, laughed again as they remembered Potter barely escaped getting eaten by a Hungarian Horntail, remembered childishly wishing they could have a dragon friend to talk to as they watched Merlin converse with Kilgharrah on the television. **Disappointing. I/you/we will be named for talking dragon, like I/you/we are a talking dragon,** they decided. **I/you/we will be Kilgharrah. I/you/we shall be ‘the dragons’ when others speak of us,** they confirmed, awfully pleased with veirself.

Their minds slowly began to resolve into distinct entities within the solar system of the Leviathan community meld, a star miraculously splitting from one into a binary, their minds orbiting each other, constantly affected by the other’s gravitational pull. Their pain began to return, but even as it doubled, it halved, muted by the connection remaining between them.

 **Bloody hell,** Drake thought, once his mind was mostly his again.

 **Gave too much of self,** Kilgharrah reprimanded. **Could have died.**

 **Worked, didn’t it?** Drake asked snottily, finding to his surprise that speaking to Kilgharrah felt more natural than even just thinking to himself. Exponentially easier than he’d ever found communicating with Atlantis. **And you can quit your bitching, I saw those memories you shared—and, really? Kilgharrah?** Drake complained, dismayed. **That’s what you want to be called? You’re naming yourself after a fictional character? And not just a made-up person, but one who will out me as a fanboy?**

 **Yes,** Kilgharrah replied smugly. **I like the speaking dragon. He best. I best. Obviously meant to be.**

 **It’s like talking to a lolcat,** Drake groaned, remembering the boot in the Mountain who’d been astonished Drake hadn’t ever seen the meme, shoving the memory at Kilgharrah. His own groan startled Drake, and he fell the rest of the way back into the physical world. He was unsurprised to find himself collapsed in an awkward heap on the floor. Again. He pushed himself up as far as sitting against the nearest wall, quickly determining that any further exertion would require more of an effort than he was willing to make at the moment.

 **You lolcat, I dragon,** Kilgharrah grumbled. **Stupid.**

 ** _Why_ are you talking like a lolcat, though?** Drake suddenly wondered.

 **Language centers damage from Wraith, from not repair fast enough,** Drake could feel Kilgharrah’s unconcerned shrug as if it were his own. **Can still think, no matter, don’t care.**

 **Alright then,** Drake agreed, **lolcat dragon,** he poked slyly, grinning through the exhaustion consuming him.

 **You to doctor,** Kilgharrah commanded, his worry permeating Drake’s mind.

 **What about you?** Drake was just as concerned as his ‘dragon.’ He’d just been dying, after all.

 **I live,** Kilgharrah assured him. **Have time now for repair. Can wait. You heal.**

 **You’re sure you’ll be alright?** Drake asked, needing the reassurance. His inner five year old had just got its lolcat-speaking dragon best friend, and had no intention of losing it anytime soon.

 **Yes. Go. _Now_ ,** Kilgharrah ordered. **Rowena say your brave-smart-kind one take to doctor. I stay brain, still together. Move now.**

Drake groaned and made himself move. He wasn’t surprised to find Granger waiting for him just outside Kilgharrah’s makeshift door, because it wasn’t like he knew anyone else that ‘brave-smart-kind’ so aptly described.

“Merlin, you’re such an idiot,” she muttered under her breath, even as she expanded her modified Protego (Drake recognized a bastardization of the standard second-year “oven mitts charm,” and felt stupid he hadn’t thought of it) to include him as well. It was more necessary than thoughtful, as Drake had about as much magic as a squib right about now, and the pier was still turning the ocean to steam. It was a good thing something about Kilgharrah’s hull, despite its damage, had protected Drake from the heat, or he’d be extra-crispy by now.

Granger helped him climb out of Kilgharrah, pulling his arm over her shoulder to take most of his weight once he was mostly standing. Drake was glad of it, since his entire body felt like it a bowl of limp noodles.

***

"I'm fine," Drake told Carson irritably, even as he let the doctor bully him on to a hospital bed.

"Why don't you let me be the judge of that," Carson said absentmindedly.

Drake took off his shirt at Carson’s prompt and sighed heavily. “It’s just sunburn and energy-drain,” he complained, “I’d be fine on my own with time to recover.”

Granger snickered. “Sorry,” she said through her laughter when they both looked at her curiously, and didn’t explain. Drake checked himself quickly, and yes, he could still feel the permanent concealing charm over his Norwegian Ridgeback magical tattoo, which he’d had the artist put on it after it’d been finished so Drake wouldn’t break the Statute every time he had a physical.

Drake asked Kilgharrah to ask Rowena why Granger was laughing at his expense, and got back a flash of an angry hippogriff and a whining child.

He groaned. “Okay, I was thirteen and it was the first time I’d ever been seriously injured or ever felt that level of pain. I’ve been to war and boot camp since. Yes, I realize I provoked him, but seriously, he cut me to the bone and I was terrified. I regret pushing for him to be destroyed,” he sighed, “but it’s not like I’ve got a time-tuARDIS,” he noticed the muggle nurse hovering and quickly rephrased, “–a TARDIS that’ll let me go back and apologize or stop it from happening,” he grimaced.

Granger had stopped laughing, and her sly grin faded to an apologetic look. “Sorry,” she said again, sounding sincere this time. “I’d never thought of it like that. But, er,” she added awkwardly, “he uh, was never killed? That time I punched you? I was distracting you from our rescue mission,” she grimaced. “So, er, yeah. He lived! You can say sorry! Er.”

Carson gave him a push to the chest, and Drake flopped back on the hospital bed to let the Ancient scanner to do its work. “Nice to know I beat myself up over that for all these years for nothing, but yeah, it’s good to know. Thanks,” he rolled his eyes to the ceiling, but really, he was actually grateful.

 **What?** Kilgharrah asked. Drake felt Kilgharrah’s consuming curiosity like it was his own, and hastened to explain.

 **The hippogriff I felt so guilty over pushing to get executed for hurting me—after I provoked it—escaped its excecution. I’m glad of it, but I still regret being so cruel about it when I was younger—I’d never had an animal friend and didn’t know much about them, so I expected them to act like people did around my father, and around me when I acted like my father. Instead, it knew I’d insulted it and, being an animal, didn’t care how about human politics, so it lashed out. I was scared and angry so I begged my father to have someone else’s animal friend be destroyed, and he did. Or so I thought,** Drake admitted.

 **Cruel, selfish child,** Kilgharrah said sadly. **All be children be like this sometimes.**

 **At least I got better,** Drake agreed.

“Are you communicating with the Leviathan right now?” Carson asked curiously.

Drake rolled his eyes over to rest on Carson. “Yeah. Why?”

“It’s remarkable,” Carson muttered. “Your long-term memory processing and your emotional centers are lighting up like mad, as well as some activity in your language centers, but not nearly as much as I’d expect.”

Drake shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about it,” he reminded Carson. “How’s my energy levels looking, can you tell with that thing? Is it like a diagnostic–” he cut himself off before he said ‘spell,’ remembering the muggle nurse who was still hovering. Carson was too distracted with whatever was on the scanner’s monitor to respond, so Drake glanced over at the nurse to make sure she hadn’t thought what he’d said was odd. She– she winked at him.

Drake studied her more closely—she looked vaguely familiar, but he didn’t recognize the name on her uniform’s name tape, ‘Keawe,’ and knew he wouldn’t have tried to pull a Navy Lieutenant back when he’d been Atlantis’s fresh meat. She leaned in close under the pretext of adjusting a part of the scanner and muttered, “Don’t worry about it, my nephew’s a kahuna. You might have seen him following Doctor Jackson or General Carter around the SGC like a lost little duckling.” She winked again and went over to look at the scanner’s monitor with Carson.

She wasn’t much older than him, so Drake tried to remember seeing any children running around the SGC. He couldn’t bring to mind any little ones other than Jesse, who was most definitely not her nephew. And what the hell was a ‘kahuna’–

“You know…” Granger murmured, and Drake tabled the issue once he realized Granger was saying something. She muttered to herself and then was silent for a bit, wearing her thinking face. Something seemed to have made Granger thoughtful, which was always cause for worry. “I’ll bet that, under Clause Seven of the Decree,” she finally continued, and Drake listened with slowly growing alarm. ”Atlantis and Wraith and the Leviathan would certainly qualify as ‘exceptional.’ I mean, I’d bet Harry was counting on something of the sort, actually, when he told Colonel Sheppard and Doctor McKay,” Granger nodded firmly, and Drake quickly sat up, ignoring his various aches and pains. Whatever was coming next couldn’t be good, but she was talking so quickly that he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. “And any case that goes to trial would mean the entire Wizengamot would have to be read in on basically everything the SGC does, so even if this doesn’t fall under Clause Seven, I doubt it’ll ever go to trial even if someone reports it. Or, I guess, if they’ve discovered the ability and desire to monitor another galaxy for unsanctioned magic, which I highly doubt. I think I’ll test it. I’m not doing anything until Colonel Sheppard gets me clearance anyway,” she said, and terrifyingly, began to wander away. “And anyone wanting to return me to the Wizengamot for judgement will have to fight Rowena for me,” she muttered, and Drake lunged for her.

He had to stop her before she, Merlin, probably sat in the middle of the ‘Gate room and started levitating Marines and techs– But he was caught and dragged back onto the bed by Carson, who was—unfortunately for Drake, and for the International Statute of Secrecy—paying attention to the world around him again. He didn’t want to give her up and get her in trouble, so he couldn’t tell Carson or Lieutenant Keawe, even though they both knew about magic, because they likely also knew about the International Statute of Secrecy. **Kilgharrah,** he tried, **can you get Rowena to stop her? She’s going to shatter the Statute!**

 **Statue? Why shatter? Where statue?** Kilgharrah asked, confused.

 ** _Statute_ ,** Drake emphasized, and shoved everything he’d ever learned about it in school at Kilgharrah.

 **Good,** Kilgharrah said firmly, once he’d understood what Drake was talking about—it wasn’t exactly something that had come up when they’d been the same mind, earlier. **Stupid. Wants to make me hide. Every people should see me and know I best, you best. Greatest dragons ever, of always. Stupid statute makes people not believe dragons reality. Dragons best.**

Drake groaned. There went that avenue of help.

 _Atlantis?_ he tried next. She swept him with a slightly cool wave of love. _I know, I’m sorry I’ve been ignoring you for Kilgharrah. I still love you,_ he sent her one of her own mental hugs. _Granger is about to do something stupid. Can you slow her down for me? Make the transporters bring her back to the infirmary?_ She sent him back a wave of affectionate agreement that suddenly stuttered to a surprised stop—Kilgharrah flooding through his mind, searching every nook and cranny of Drake’s mind, looking for the place in it that Drake was using to speak to Atlantis.

 ** _Atlantis you hear me?!_** Kilgharrah exclaimed, excited and determined. Atlantis sent back what was, essentially, the emotional equivalent of an amazed and excited 96-point question mark.

Drake groaned. He felt like a muggle phone, the way they were all of a sudden conferencing via his brain. _**No stop Drake’s brave-smart-kind one, she doing smart thing. She make people know wizards, then people be able telling wizards how not hurt you.**_ Atlantis sent back a surprised collage of giggles and another wave of agreement, this one flavored with just a dash of mischievousness.

Drake shook his head in disbelief, and threw up some mental barricades that would exclude himself from their conversation—without kicking them out of his mind. It was times like these that he seriously considered the possibility that this galaxy was actually conspiring against him, so like hell was he going to interfere in a meeting of minds between the two people who were most able to inconvenience him back if he narked them off.

Carson was staring at him. Drake wondered how long that had been going on, and stared back, raising his eyebrows.

“You’re back with us, then?” Carson asked, amused.

“Kilgharrah and Atlantis have discovered they can talk to each other through the medium of my brain,” Drake said simply, feeling put-upon, knowing it was audible in his voice and not caring.

“Kilgharrah is your Leviathan? They can’t talk to each other normally, then?” Carson asked, intrigued. “Are they not both telepaths?”

“Yeah, and not really,” Drake paused a moment, trying to figure out how to explain it in a way that would first, make sense, and second, distract Lieutenant Keawe—whose face had been a study in trying not to laugh ever since Drake had mentioned Kilgharrah’s name—from whatever it was she was thinking. “I guess you could say Atlantis is more of an empath? At least what I get from her, it’s all feelings and images. Kilgharrah—Leviathan in general, really—is more like actually talking with someone, except for with the ability to share memories and concepts and emotions.”

“So like texting with added video and images and emoji, as opposed to old school texting with ASCII and emoticons?” Lieutenant Keawe asked.

 _Mission: Distraction is a success,_ Drake thought triumphantly, and felt the very odd sensation of two spaceships picking through his mind to figure out what he was talking about. Apparently they’d worked their way around his barriers. Drake sighed, but didn’t put them back up, and made himself ignore their exploration of his brain. “I suppose.” He hadn’t had much experience with texting, being firstly a wizard, secondly a Gen-Xer, and thirdly generally in another galaxy to any sort of commercial phone plan; though he hadn’t been a complete luddite ever since he’d started playing muggle nearly half his life ago, and had had a cell phone when he’d been stationed at on Earth. “Though if the Leviathan are texting, they’re those people who always type in all caps, all the time.”

“Well, they essentially found an alien species who speaks their language. That would excite anyone, wouldn’t it?” Carson asked, and Lieutenant Keawe nodded.

 ** _VERY EXCITING!_** Kilgharrah exclaimed. Atlantis sent a wave of emphatic agreement along with her memory files of ATA-carriers finally returning to her after 10,000 years.

“They agree,” he told Carson and Lieutenant Keawe, resigned to his current fate as inter-species translator. He just hoped Granger didn’t decide exploding things or startling Marines was an acceptable first introduction to magic for the personnel of Atlantis.

***

Drake should have figured that a vague but intriguing inter-departmental email and subsequent informative lecture was the method Granger would choose. The fact that her show and tell involved levitating most of the science department probably hadn’t hurt in the ‘keeping asses in seats’ department for the rest of the attendees, despite the university flashbacks Drake figured every other ex-student was also experiencing.

Colonel Sheppard looked shell shocked, apparently stunned into mute immobility for the entirety of Granger’s big reveal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty much constantly cursing myself for all the bold and italics when I go to post each chapter. >.


	25. In which it isn't paranoia if Pegasus really is fucking out to get you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate chapter titles:  
> In which John drops the f-bomb a whole fucking lot.  
> In which John's life is fucking awful—until Rodney returns, and everything is suddenly less awful.  
> John and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day and a half (and/or whole length of Rodney's coma).  
> In which John is a cranky old man (and he… just, really, REALLY? He really never sees it coming, does he?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: John references schizophrenia (in a having auditory hallucinations/voices-that-aren't-his talking about him in his head sort of way), he repeatedly implies that the Marines are dumb (mainly because he's oblivious and they're not), and just generally takes his pain out on everyone. Rodney... Rodney, ever the connoisseur of political correctness, makes a joke in which the act of cutting is the punch line. I do not think cutting is in any way funny, nor are any other physical expressions of mental or emotional pain. Rodney, however, is an insensitive dick, socially awkward, and not actually very funny.
> 
> In less depressing news: Here, have a double-size chapter in apology for the recent dearth of updates! You've all been very patient, lovely people :D

JOHN

John was starting to really fucking regret accepting General O’Neill’s job offer. “Come back, be the military commander of Atlantis,” he muttered to himself. “The entire galaxy hates you and wants to make your life horrible, you know you miss that.” Though, even if that had been O’Neill’s pitch, John would probably have been sold on it anyway.

Atlantis drowned him in reproach. _Yes, I missed you. Hated it without you. But you can’t argue that this galaxy doesn’t fucking have it out for me,_ he pointed out petulantly. Fuck. John hated painkillers. They made him fuzzy and slow. But—as he was currently discovering—going without them was a bitch and a half. It felt like most of his brain was constantly thinking about his leg and how much it hurt, leaving the few scattered remnants of his mind to scramble around for coherency. Yes, he was trying to go without them now. Yes, he was regretting it, and had been since the last one had worn off.

“Uh, sir?” Major Morris asked hesitantly, and John remembered he wasn’t alone on his way to confront his son about his son’s premature aging thanks to said son’s _accidental magic_ complying with the devout desire for respect from the local scientific community, who didn’t acknowledge said son because—oh right, because he was _five_. And John’s most effective backup (recently discovered, and really the best thing about coming back to Atlantis) for dealing with Jesse’s irrational intractable moods was in a healing coma on an alien, sentient, magical spaceship.

Seriously, John highly doubted anyone else in the _entire universe_ had his problems.

“Nothing, Major. Never mind,” John said irritably.

“Right. Uh, why am I here, Colonel? Sergeant Markham is on Jesse Watch this shift,” Morris asked carefully.

John scowled. “Because McKay’s still in space and you’re the next best thing when it comes to getting my son to listen to reason,” he explained briefly, even though the reminder of Rodney’s absence just increased his annoyance with the galaxy in general.

God, he felt like a crotchety old man, and the cane Pasha had prescribed and Carson had enforced certainly wasn’t helping. He could hear the whispers going through the Marines about Atlantis’s Grand Old Man already, even though this was the first time he’d been out of his quarters since Pasha had forced the cane on him (mostly because Atlantis thought the Marines were _hilarious_ , and she was piping the whispers directly into John’s brain from every audio pickup she could access. He was starting to feel seriously schizophrenic, with all the voices she was putting in his head).

“Er. I don’t know if I’m exactly qualified to co-parent your kid, even temporarily, sir,” Morris hedged.

John stopped—his leg might have been hollering for a rest, but that wasn’t why (no, really)—to turn and raise an eyebrow at Morris. “No one asked you to. You’re my moral and logical support for when Jesse starts arguing facts, which he will,” John said slowly. It was the obvious explanation, but sometimes he wondered about these Marines the SGC sent him. Even the ones who with the college degrees required for officer candidacy seemed to have been hit over the head a few too many times. “Marines,” he muttered, shaking his head, and returned to creeping his way towards his apartment.

As they walked—slowly—to his quarters, John saw Morris give him some eyebrows of his own out of the corner of his eye. _Really, son, you’re just proving my point,_ John thought pityingly. Morris couldn’t help being a Marine, or magic, poor kid. Atlantis responded with a wave of confusion—she was much more present in his head these days, ever since that infant of a British Prime Minister had cut their connection and she’d restored it with the Chair. _Morris’s brain works in mysterious ways,_ he explained to Atlantis. _I guess he can’t really help being weird, being a magic Marine and all._

Atlantis sent him back a wave of confusion. _Can nobody see what’s right in front of their faces, these days?_ John asked her belligerently. She didn’t respond, seemingly distracted, her attention fading away even though her presence in his mind lingered. John shrugged. At least she’d quit with the Marines’ whisper campaign.

***

John had dismissed Morris for being a distraction stacked on top of absolutely no help whatsoever shortly into his discussion with Jesse. Not long after Morris had left, the city shuddered briefly under John’s feet; Jesse rushed to the window. “Rowena’s taking off!” Jesse announced, in concert with Atlantis’s shoving the security feeds from the east pier into John’s head.

“Awesome,” John replied laconically. “Doesn’t change what we were talking about.”

Jesse sighed heavily and trudged back over to stand before John, eyes flickering back and forth from him to the window. John stood firm—there’d be other take-offs for Jesse to moon over later.

Jesse sighed again (the kid’s melodrama was becoming hilarious enough that John was beginning to have trouble keeping a straight face) and loosely paraphrased back what John had been saying. “I solemnly swear to learn things from Marky—I mean, Sergeant Markham—and not have any fun at all while I do it, or to try and do things he says I’m not ready for _even though I totally am_ until he says I can. Ditto for everyone else teaching me about magic,” Jesse sighed, aggrieved.

Sergeant Markham was trying to make himself inconspicuous in the far corner of the room, and John appreciated that.

Jesse continued, “Or to have any fun at all while at my other lessons, even if Torren is there. And I won’t try to grow up faster and I will try to enjoy being a kid while I still can, even if it’s one who’s being grounded for– Ugh, Dad! This is so unfair!” he broke off to complain. “It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose!”

“And that’s why you’re not being grounded for it,” John said wryly. “Did you forget the whole ‘running away to see the Leviathan’ thing? I hope not, considering you did it _twice in a row_ ,” John reminded him. The kid had Shawn’s memory when it came to things he wanted to remember, but everything else seemed to be the definition of ‘in one ear and out the other.’

“And I’m _sorry_ ,” Jesse complained. “It’s not like I’ll get any sorrier the longer you ground me,” he grumped, and John had to suppress the urge to laugh. Couldn’t encourage him.

“Sorry doesn’t make Rodney get better quicker,” John reminded Jesse, maybe a little harshly.

“But–!”

“I know it wasn’t on purpose,” he cut Jesse off when he started to protest. “But it happened as a result of your actions, and you need to take responsibility for it. I know it wasn’t your idea to go back up the second time—believe me, I’ll be talking to Rodney about that when he gets back—but he went up the second time because you went up the first time, and because you didn’t relay his request to the Leviathan to stay put until further notice. Capiche?” John asked, not willing to let this go. Jesse nodded sullenly, eyes glued to the floor. If his kid was going to grow up on a military base, he needed to learn to take orders and question later, for his own safety. That was a good point, actually. “If you want to stay on Atlantis, you’ve got to obey orders when you’re given them. You might think you know better, but you won’t always have all the facts, so you’ve gotta trust that whoever’s giving you the orders knows what they’re talking about.”

“You’re going to send me _away?!_ ” Jesse shrieked in outrage, echoed quickly by Atlantis.

“Shut it, both of you!” John ordered, echoing himself mentally at Atlantis. “I’m not going to send you away, _unless_ ,” he emphasized, “I think you’re in more danger here than you would be on Earth. Disobeying orders puts your safety at risk, and I won’t have it,” John said firmly. “If you keep it up, you’re off the city.”

Not that John had any clue where he’d send him, if it came to that. Jesse had never met his Uncle Dave or his cousins, but that was at least a better alternative—with Dave’s income and security and the top-notch exclusive schools his kids went to—than the constantly-culled Athosians. Morris’s friend (Rowena’s pilot, whatshername, Granger) had said something about an American magic academy. Maybe it was a boarding school.

As much as John didn’t want to repeat his father’s parenting mistakes, it might end up being the best option, if Jesse couldn’t work his shit out.

Speaking of Jesse, he’dp been quiet for an unnervingly long time after John’s ultimatum. John looked beyond his belligerent stance and saw a few tears trickling down Jesse’s cheeks. _Fuck,_ John cursed himself. It was getting hard to remember lately that Jesse was just five—his mind may be growing up faster than usual, but the rest of his body didn’t seem to be maturing quite so fast (pending the tests Carson wanted to do that John had yet to tell Jesse about), and his kid still had all the mood-swings and thin skin of the average five year old.

“Oh, sweetheart,” John sighed, and got painfully down to his knees so he could drag his stubbornly-stiff son into a hug. “I’m sorry, baby. I wasn’t trying to upset you. Remember how you said before that I don’t want you to leave me like your mom did? I’m scared that if you get into the habit of disobeying orders people give you, you’re going to get hurt, or even die. I know, a lot of the time you might know better, or think you know better, but can you promise me that you’ll do what you’re told?” John listened to what he was saying, and if his son was anything like him, that wouldn’t fly. “ _Unless_ ,” John added quickly, “unless you think someone friendly will get hurt or killed if you follow the order, and you have a way to do whatever it is so no one will get hurt. Okay?”

John felt Jesse’s slow nod against John’s shoulder. “Okay,” Jesse said quietly.

“And then, if you have time, you argue about it with whoever gave you the orders, or tell someone else what you’re doing—only if it’s absolutely time-critical, we’re talking seconds-to-live situation here, do you do it without telling anyone at all—and whoever you tell has to either be the same rank of whoever gave the orders, or be just above or just below them, or be me or Morris or Rodney, got it?” Jesse’d picked up Atlantis’s mish-mash of rank insignia and structure pretty much the first time he’d set foot on the city, so at least that wasn’t a concern.

“Teyla and Ronon? Atlantis?” Jesse questioned suspiciously.

“Or Teyla or Ronon,” John agreed. “Atlantis only if she won’t keep it a secret to keep you out of trouble,” he amended.

Jesse nodded against John’s shoulder again, before pulling away, rubbing at his reddened eyes with his fists. “Okay,” he sighed. “I didn’t mean to be a crybaby,” he quickly reassured John and Sergeant Markham.

John shook his head and sat back on his knees, ignoring the stabbing pain in his thigh, to stay on Jesse’s eye-level. “Don’t ever apologize for crying. It’s okay to cry if you feel like you need to. Even Marines cry, right Sergeant?” John asked, putting Markham on the spot and fixing him with a gimlet glare.

“All the time,” Markham quickly reassured Jesse, and it didn’t even sound like a lie. “When a friend dies, or when you get hurt really bad, or you get really bad news, or sometimes when something little goes wrong and it’s just one thing too much,” he continued, not nearly as reassuringly as John would have hoped. “Being strong doesn’t mean you can’t cry, and crying doesn’t make you weak. Stacks cries all the time,” he confided with an air of secrecy, “at books, at shows, at movies. You don’t think Stacks is a crybaby, do you?”

Jesse shook his head, wide-eyed and awed. “Really?” he breathed.

“Really, really,” Markham confirmed. “But don’t tell anyone I told you, or Stacks will kick my a–” he corrected himself quickly, “yell at me. Not everyone is as enlightened as we are.”

Jesse nodded fervently, promising to keep Stackhouse’s secret.

Well, that had gone better than John had expected, excluding Markham’s digression into fear, pain, and loss. John moved on to the next item of the agenda, which were the blood tests and scans Carson wanted to do to find out if the rate at which Jesse’s mind and body were maturing corresponded, and as a second opinion on whether Jesse’s brain was growing up more quickly than was natural.

Thankfully, the good mood Markham’s confidence had put Jesse in continued. Jesse agreed without hesitation to Carson’s test, with only one, well, two and a half caveats: Jesse could watch Carson the whole time he was doing the tests and ask questions (and have them answered), and Jesse could have fun while doing it.

John shook his head—his kid was weird—but agreed to the caveats. At least the magic thing meant his kid probably wouldn’t grow up to be a lawyer. John hoped.

***

The next morning, John was supervising Jesse’s magic lessons with Radek (mostly as an excuse to remain in his quarters so he wouldn’t have to use the goddamned fucking old-man cane).

“Oh!” Jesse suddenly cried, sounding terrified, interrupting whatever Radek was saying. “Something’s wrong! Daddy, the Leviathan–” the beep of John’s radio overrode Jesse.

The next few minutes were a wash of adrenaline, reminding John just how much he missed being in the thick of things. He left Jesse with Radek and a reminder that Radek’s life was forfeit if anything happened to Jesse, tearing down the hall to the transporters so he could check in with the nerve center of Atlantis’s Control Tower, cane forgotten and pain subsumed by adrenaline.

The giant room was filled with urgent voices and muted panic, and he basked in the familiarity even as he lowered the tension by demanding reports from the techs and barking confirmations of and additions to Morris’s earlier orders.

Atlantis alerted him that she was lowering the shield Morris had ordered raised a few minutes earlier. _Are you sure?_ John asked. Everything he was hearing from the Tower’s techs heavily implied that without the shield, they’d all be nothing but atoms in just a minute or two.

 _Trust,_ Atlantis commanded him, and he did. He trusted her, but he still sprinted from the Tower to the nearest transporter, not even galled at the way Morris had already been everywhere John went. He was playing follow the leader with the current leader of AR-1 and his own 3IC, but in a weird way, Morris was proving himself to John by doing John’s job, because Atlantis and her personnel were far, far more important to John than his pride.

Atlantis lowered the shield. Less than a minute and a half later, John’s radio roared with the cheers from the Tower, and John assumed that meant they were golden. He confirmed by double-checking with Rowena, “So, we all gonna die?” as he finally drew even with the cluster of Marines gathered by the transporter nearest to the east pier. (The adrenaline was beginning to fade just enough that John could feel the edges of some serious pain coming from his leg, but he ignored it. It wasn’t like he could have gone straight from the Control Tower’s transporter to this one—doing so would have practically guaranteed the Marines’ urgent need to use it in the few seconds it was occupied.)

“Probability of Atlantis’s obliteration at point two percent and standing,” Rowena replied cheerfully, the smartass.

“Good to hear,” John said, letting himself smile briefly. “Always good not to be the impact site. Standing by at the transporters. Let us know when we won’t catch on fire just standing next to you, and can approach–” John broke off, commotion by the transporter distracting him. Morris was struggling against Markham and Stackhouse’s attempts to get past them to the transporter. Morris didn’t seem to even notice them, which was creepy and alarming.

‘Creepy and alarming’ in Pegasus was always something John had to worry about. “Fucking–” restrain him, knock him out, John meant to say, but it was then that Morris broke past the Sergeants and ran into the open transporter. “Major Morris, get your ass back here! Major!” the transporter doors slid closed after Morris, and refused to reopen when the Marines attempted to force them, so John switched his radio to the the public frequency. He _assumed_ Morris had taken the transporter to the pier, that it had something to do with the Leviathans or Granger, but he wasn’t confident enough to risk it. “Be advised, Major Morris appears to be acting unlike himself, mind control or alien influence a possibility. Approach with caution until further notice,” he said calmly over the public channel. _Rodney, you fuck, you’d better get your ass back on Atlantis soon, I need the backup,_ he thought, switching to a private channel to Morris. “Morris, I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing, but get your ass to the transporter and take yourself directly to the infirmary right the fuck now. That’s an order, Marine,” he commanded.

He couldn’t hear anything but Morris muttering something that sounded like “Protect, oh protect, oh protect,” over and over in a cracked whisper. Ominous.

“Major Morris, return to the transporter now,” he ordered again, hoping the simplicity would get through where his previous order hadn’t.

All he heard was banging, scratching, and something hissing loudly. Fuck, it felt like he was listening to a horror movie. Suddenly Morris started talking, begging and pleading, “Please, let me help. I can help you, I know it. Tell me what to do, I’ll do anything I can. You can’t die! Come on, something. What do I do? How do I help? Take mine, you can have mine.” God, just listening to it was heart wrenching.

 _Who is he talking to?_ he asked Atlantis abruptly, belatedly remembering the security feeds on the pier. She showed him what was going on—nothing, from what John could see, though he realized with relief that the hissing he’d heard was the pier turning the ocean to the steam that kept wafting in front of the camera, momentarily obscuring the picture. She rewound the feed, and he could mostly make out Morris forcing his way into the bigger of the two Leviathan, the one he didn’t think was Rowena.

“Too bad. I’m doing it anyway,” Morris said suddenly, and then screamed. He screamed so loudly that John cursed and yanked the radio out of his ear, but Morris’s screaming was still audible from the tiny earpiece.

“Heat-resistant suits, go,” John ordered the nearest Marine, who took off running, along with a pack of his fellow soldiers. Their commanding officer was out there; John understood. The quicker they all got into the aluminized high heat suits, the quicker they could go out and get him away from whatever was making him scream like that.

The screaming stopped suddenly. Icy dread flooded John even as he quickly shoved the radio back into place, but he relaxed when he heard the pained groan and gasping breaths—not dead, not yet. They still had time to get to him. “Merlin,” Morris’s radio faintly picked up Granger’s voice, “you’re such an idiot.”

John could barely hear her, but that didn’t negate his relief. She sounded exasperated and irritated, not panicked or terrified or afraid.

“Stand down,” he ordered the remaining Marines, “the Deputy Prime Minister has Major Morris and is bringing him in.” He radioed the Marines he’d sent for the heat suits and gave them the good news before dismissing all of them to return to their duties.

Except for two.

“You,” he nodded at Sergeants Markham and Stackhouse, “stay here.” After the rest of the Marines had dispersed—he didn’t know who was or wasn’t magical at the moment, and he wasn’t going to risk it—he gave Markham and Stackhouse their new orders. “Shadow Morris. Stay on him, but don’t let him see you. Just until we can be sure it was just the Leviathan in his head, and not some new threat. Radek can stay on Jesse Watch till we know the Major is himself.” They nodded and faded away before his very eyes.

John really needed to have a talk with Morris, wanted desperately to find out how many of these tactical advantages his people would be willing to use in the field under orders. The Wraith wouldn’t know what hit them.

Later, though. After this fuckery was cleared up.

Until then, he was going to go stand around in the Control Tower and make sure no one panicked in the aftermath and accidentally attacked the friendlies who looked a little different—it’d been known to happen before, though John’s memories were from the Middle East, thankfully, not Atlantis. Not yet, and he was keeping it that way.

***

“Doctor Beckett’s scans cleared him; it’s just the Major in there,” Sergeant Markham said not much later, when the Marines hunted John down in the Control Tower to report, having left Morris in the infirmary under the watchful eyes of Carson and Lieutenant Keawe. John signaled the Marines to follow him and took their conversation out into the relative privacy of the hallway.

“Well, and his Leviathan and Atlantis,” Sergeant Stackhouse added, the Marines falling in behind John. “Apparently they’ve discovered they can talk to each other through him, somehow, and they’re getting along great.”

“Major Morris doesn’t seem too thrilled about it, but it doesn’t seem like anything to worry about,” Markham agreed.

 _Great, he’s just jinxed it,_ John thought incautiously, and was swamped by a wave of affronted petulance from Atlantis. _Not that I think you’d do anything to hurt us—on purpose,_ John reassured her, _but honestly. Please don’t conspire with the Leviathan. It’s only gonna lead to tears._ The guilty silence he got in response made him groan. _What did you do?_ The guilt flooding him washed higher, then ebbed away as Atlantis quietly retreated from his mind, probably so she could avoid getting yelled at.

John flipped over to the public channel and rescinded the BOLO order he’d issued on Morris earlier, despite the boatload of paranoia Atlantis had just left him with. He doubted that Morris, who was usually sensible despite being a magical Marine, would be the instigator in whatever Atlantis had set into motion.

And that was when the adrenaline wore off completely; John’s leg said _fuck you, asshole,_ and collapsed out from under him.

Markham and Stackhouse, conveniently still following him down the corridor, lunged and managed to catch him before he hit the floor. _I guess this is better than having to use you as Pegasus’s version of Life Alert,_ John thought dourly to Atlantis, who was suddenly all up in his head again and fluttering around in there with worry. He couldn’t bring himself to reassure her, because the pain in his leg was fucking excruciating, and John regretted everything. But hell if he was going to the infirmary.

“My quarters,” he ordered the Marines from between clenched teeth, because his painkillers and his fucking cane were there. On the bright side, at least it had happened in an empty hallway, and not in the middle of the Control Tower, where he’d been just minutes before.

Stackhouse and Markham muttered compliance as they slung his arms around his shoulders and lifted him in a seat carry, supporting him on a chair of their forearms, and quick-stepped him into the nearest transporter. It was only very slightly less embarrassing than a bridal carry, especially since the transporter doors opened on the infirmary, rather than the deserted hallway leading to the privacy of John’s quarters.

“Insubordinate motherfuckers,” John muttered. He didn’t know whether to blame the Sergeants or Atlantis, so decided they’d all get the blame until his leg stopped screaming. The Sergeants ignored him and carried him to his doom. Morris had apparently already been discharged—John didn’t spot him on any of the beds—but Carson was wearing his familiar expression of mingled resignation and ‘what have you done to yourself now’ disappointment. It was an expression John had gotten to be exceedingly familiar with during the first few months of the expedition’s presence on Atlantis, considering John’s tendency to disobey doctors’ orders. (And anything that might resemble common sense, according to Carson and Rodney.)

Carson pumped John full of painkillers, threatened to surgically attach the cane to John’s hand if he kept conveniently ‘forgetting’ to use it, and manhandled him into one of the hospital beds to sleep it off. John escaped the infirmary as soon as Carson turned his back—or at least, John was planning to, except he was out like a light as soon as his head hit the thin pillow.

***

Walking into the mess hall and seeing most of Atlantis settling into rows of seats, and Granger flipping through some notes up on a makeshift stage—which looked like a couple of lunch tables pushed together and reinforced from underneath, a bad idea in itself—wasn’t something John was prepared to deal with today. He’d only just talked his way out of the infirmary in time to catch a few hours of sleep in his own bed before the sun rose. Hobbling into his quarters, he’d found Morris camped out on the couch in John’s quarters like usual, taking the night shift on Jesse Watch. It was becoming a weirdly familiar sight, the Major dozing on John’s couch. John wasn’t sure he liked it, but Morris was really the only one on Jesse Watch that John could handle having in his quarters at night.

Apparently, in the past day and a half or so, word had spread through Atlantis’s magical underground about Jesse’s potential, and that John was ‘in the know’ about magic. Every shift but the night shift on Jesse Watch was now just a few hours long. More of Atlantis’s personnel than John had thought possible had, in the few spare minutes he’d had between disasters lately, requested private meetings with John and revealed themselves to him as magical—and volunteered for a shift on Jesse Watch.

The fact that there were so many of them under his command, and that he hadn’t had a clue, made John a little nervous. Nervous enough that he’d neglected to include any of this recent ‘magic’ business in his daily reports back to the SGC, no matter how much obfuscation or outright lying it had required. He knew these men and women, knew that they were good people. He also knew that someone else, most everybody else above him in his chain of command, would take one look at the situation and think ‘sleeper cell,’ especially with all terrorism and fear-mongering going on back on Earth. It had made John wary enough that he hadn’t even mentioned any of it to O’Neill yet, and he trusted O’Neill implicitly.

He wasn’t taking those nerves out on any of Atlantis’s magical community—or trying not to, at least—but out of all of them, Morris had the best connection to Atlantis. Being magical as well as ATA-positive was apparently a fairly uncommon trait; Morris, Markham, and Stackhouse were the only magical ATA-carriers John had on Atlantis (that he or Carson knew of, at least; not counting Jesse). Morris’s was natural (always an overachiever, that one), and out of the entire magical community, Markham and Stackhouse were the only two who had responded to the gene therapy, and they couldn’t even talk to Atlantis, just interact with her.

So knowing that Atlantis could contact and/or wake both of them if something happened with Jesse was the only way John could relax enough to sleep. It apparently wasn’t enough for Morris—John could never tell if Morris was actually dozing or just pretending to, but he suspected the latter; it was something that was beginning to concern John, because if Morris was running himself ragged the consequences would show up soon. Probably at the worst possible time. Compromised judgement, slowed reaction times, impaired memory—in Pegasus, those all came back to bite you in the ass.

John was in the mess hall because he’d gotten the same vague email everyone else had this morning—he’d assumed (incorrectly, apparently) that it was from Woolsey, but Woolsey was sitting in front of the makeshift stage rather than on it. At least Woolsey sitting front and center, and looking attentive, probably meant Woolsey wasn’t in the know. He didn’t have anything against Woolsey, but John suspected that Woolsey would see the situation more from Granger’s point of view, his fellow bureaucrat, rather than from John’s military-minded worst-scenario point of view, which would complicate things.

The email had requested all available Atlantis personnel to gather in the mess hall for a debrief from Earth. He’d assumed it’d be something about complications stemming from Putin’s relatively recent re-election to Russia’s presidency (Putin was _not_ a fan of the Stargate Program, especially the military commander and most of the military being American), or the rumor going around about the future’s coming changes to the UCMJ, and how either of those changes would affect the international expedition (nothing they could do about it from Pegasus, and not at all, respectively).

Now, John just wished he’d just locked Deputy Prime Minister Granger in the brig the second she stepped foot on Atlantis. The political repercussions from _that_ would doubtless be less than from _this_. The first excited letter home that went through the censors was going to result in a bitch of a preemptive strike from some paranoid brasshole.

John could see it now: Being ordered to capture and contain his own people. Knowingly aiding in the torture of and experimentation on innocent soldiers and civilians. Refusing to do so and losing his command, his commission, Pegasus, his _son_ … Unless John either broke with Earth and took the city on the run, or figured out some way to discredit Granger before any of this got out. Atlantis interrupted his train of thought, accusing him of paranoia. _I can’t just let it go at ‘magic is real!’ Look at what ex-Senator Kinsey did,_ he remembered the names of a few pertinent SGC mission report files in the directory at her, _with just the knowledge that aliens were out there. Aliens who weren’t even living among the people of Earth, and had been for millennia. Look at my planet,_ he briefly explained the current events and wars going on back on Earth, _we’re not reasonable, forgiving people. We don’t greet new things with open arms—we try and shoot them, most of the time. People are horrible and cruel and dangerous, at least most of the ones in charge. It’s how they got to be in charge._ He could feel Atlantis’s shock and horror, and her quick retreat from John’s head and the facts he was throwing at her.

John watched numbly as the science department floated up out of their seats and hung in the air.

How the fuck was John supposed to explain this? Maybe there was something in the city he could blame, something that caused telekinetic abilities. His people were used to mysterious Ancient devices granting superpowers and then trying to kill people, which would give him an excuse to confine Granger until he got some sense talked into her. There was probably even an actual device that did that somewhere in the city, possibly another version of the ascension machine. Maybe Rodney could fiddle with something innocuous until they could claim it was a prototype that did something similar to the ascension machine, but also caused delusions? That might explain all her talk about magic… That, or plagiarizing Doctor Who (Mass hallucinations? Too many Whovians on base for that to go over successfully.) were the only options John could think of right now. Rodney could probably come up with something better.

But Rodney wasn’t here. John was on his own.

Granger launched into an explanation of her extra-dimensional theory, and the connection between Leviathan and wizards, and John just– He he couldn’t just sit here and watch this fucking shitshow. _Rodney,_ he thought fiercely, _get your ass back to Atlantis. I need you, man._ A moment later, Granger started swooping the laughing science division around to prove some point, and John walked out. He was already in the back of the mess hall, so not many of them had had eyes on him in the first place. If he stayed any longer, he’d try to stop this disaster in the making somehow, and probably just make it worse. Anyway, he had to get the ‘gate locked down before Granger’s show and tell was over, contain the damage to just Atlantis. If he asked nicely, Atlantis could probably manage to manufacture some sort of DHD malfunction that restricted her ‘gate to local addresses only, maybe even incoming local addresses only, and he wouldn’t have to overtly mutiny against Earth to keep his people safe. (Yes, all of his people. Even that idiot Granger. She was his people as long as she was on Atlantis, even if she was a super-intelligent moron.)

It was the only solution he could think of at the moment that would give him time to breathe, and think, and restrict Granger to quarters (he didn’t care if it was on Rowena as long as she stopped fucking talking to his personnel), and he wouldn’t have to keep any of his gate teams out in the cold, or put them in danger. Thank fuck that Atlantis’s ‘gate was the only inter-galactic-capable one that John had to worry about in Pegasus.

As John left the mess hall, Morris—who’d apparently been lurking back by the mess doors—fell into step with him. John hoped like hell Morris wasn’t about to try and talk John over to Granger’s ‘everyone should know everything’ point of view.

Morris waited until they were both out of sight and earshot from the mess to ask skeptically, “Atlantis says you want McKay back—do you really think he’d be able to fix this mess Granger just dumped in our laps?” John held back a sigh of relief. Morris was on-side.

“Let him talk her to death for all I care,” he muttered, then reigned himself in. That was John’s stubborn lack of painkillers talking. “She responds to logic, right? Like Jesse. McKay’s the best of anyone I know at talking Jesse into or out of shit, so I’d bet on him.”

Morris shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it, sir, but yeah. She has in the past.”

“There’s that, at least.” John rubbed his head, and managed to conk himself in the head with his fucking cane. “Goddamn,” he muttered again, “this fucking day. Walk with me, Major,” he said louder, conscious of the growing babble of surprised exclamations from the crowd in the mess hall. Probably better if his personnel didn’t overhear him conspiring to confine them right now. He led Morris back to his own quarters and flopped on the couch. “At ease,” he told Morris, still standing at attention in front of John. “Cop a squat. No ranks now, Morris. Gotta focus on getting this shit contained.”

Morris sat in the armchair catty-corner to the couch, and John swung around so he could prop his bitching leg up on the couch cushions and see Morris at the same time.

“By contain the situation, you mean…” Morris trailed off.

“I don’t mean throwing her in the brig or disappearing her, as much as I’d like to,” John agreed, ignoring the way that made Morris tense. “But I’m asking Atlantis if she can see a way to restrict ‘gate travel to local addresses only, for a start,” John said as he asked Atlantis the same thing. She agreed to cause a short that would prevent all outgoing wormholes from finishing the dialing process, a malfunction complicated enough to stymie the techs but something their Rodney would find a breeze to fix. She refused to do anything to prevent incoming wormholes, citing the presence of her iris and not understanding when John tried to explain how refusing to communicate with Earth if they called while having the ability to do so would be a very bad thing.

“There’s always the old faking a bad connection trick,” Morris shrugged after John explained the problem. “Or…” he trailed off again, but John recognized the look of trying to carry two conversations at once, and didn’t prompt him. “Kill wants to know why we can’t just make the iris strong enough to block even incoming transmissions. I didn’t think it was possible, but that might be because we think of our iris like the SGC’s, a physical shield rather than an energy barrier. Atlantis agrees that she can do it,” he narrated after a moment.

John rolled his eyes. “Dammit man, I’m a telepath not a mind-reader,” he commented wryly, but didn’t try to explain when Morris just looked at him blankly, just moved on—well, digressed. “Did you seriously name your Leviathan Kill? That’s a Marine thing, isn’t it.” Morris didn’t change expression, but he flushed bright red, the color creeping up from his neck to his hairline slowly enough that John could actually see it happen.

John made a face. “Okay, on second thought, I don’t want to know. Please don’t answer. Anyway. Before we can communicate with Earth, we’ve got to discredit Granger somehow. We could find some Ancient device that causes similar abilities and blame it on that, something that would have made her believe in magic. We can’t have anyone thinking any of it might be true,” John sighed. “Fuck this day, seriously.”

Morris’s blush had already faded, and now his blank mask faltered. “There are memory charms we could use to just make them forget it all happened,” he offered hesitantly, almost reluctantly.

John shook his head in firm negation. “Without even getting into the ethical minefield of brain-damaging my people without their consent,” he began bluntly, and Morris’s blank mask slammed back into place. John didn’t know if that meant Morris approved or was offended, and John honestly didn’t really care right now, “most of us have been here too long to trust our memory alone. I can guarantee that most of the scientists and at least half the military have video, audio, notes; reminders stashed everywhere on their persons and their private servers, directories, and devices. I don’t know about your time here, but the first five or six years were fucking filled with accidental or malicious memory loss. I know you probably don’t want to make Granger look like a nutcase, but it’s our best option. None of the veterans will think less of her, and the rookies that do won’t by the time their tour’s up, if they even survive it. Everyone who’s been here for a full tour has had this sort of shit happen to them at least once.” John sighed. Morris’s mask hadn’t slipped again.

“If we can’t convince her to go along with this, she’s got to either go into the brig or be confined to Rowena until we can get this FUBAR situation sanitized. Otherwise someone’s gonna slip it into a report, either because they’re being conscientious or because they know and are pushing for what might happen. If it gets out, you guys will be fucked, and so will Atlantis.” Morris was still looking frosty. “How many are there of you, magical people or whatever, back on Earth?” John asked, not changing the subject as much as it appeared he might be.

“About 1.7 million, somewhere in there,” Morris answered promptly. He didn’t even have to think about it. Then again, John didn’t have to think very hard to remember the world’s population was around 7 billion.

The math was easy. “That’s around two hundredths of a percent of the planet’s population. Now what if I told you that at least ten percent, maybe as high as fifteen, of Atlantis’s population were magic? Think about those two numbers, and then pretend you’re a pompous no-nothing paranoid brasshole with lots of chest candy who’s immersed in the ‘war on terror’ back home. Even odds on whether he’s someone who gets his kicks from scaring people. Then what?” John asked evenly.

Morris blanched, what little color there was in his normally pale face draining away abruptly, starkly highlighting the dark circles under the Major’s eyes. (John reminded himself to order the Major to get some rack time, the sooner the better.)

John crossed his arms across his chest, satisfied. “That’s why we’ve got to discredit Granger. We have to play it like we’re humoring her, even though we know better, until we can come up with a plan.”

“That’s why you want McKay,” Morris realized out loud. “Because even if he can’t talk her into it, he’ll be able to talk everyone else into it. He’s the one who used the ascension machine, he’s got credibility.” Morris stared blankly at the wall for a moment, then nodded. “Kill says McKay’s almost done cooking, or whatever the boss Leviathan’s doing to him. You want I should take a Jumper up and get him? Kill’s not ready for flight yet, as much as he disagrees,” Morris volunteered.

“Fuck yes. Are you serious?” John breathed. “Get his ass back here.”

Morris hesitated for a few seconds, visibly debating something, then clapped John on the shoulder incredibly awkwardly. “It’s alright, sir. Kill assures me that McKay’s fine. You’ll have him back soon, probably tomorrow, Kill says.” With that bit of randomness, he bolted out of John’s quarters so fast he never saw John’s raised eyebrows, and marched purposefully down the hall.

“What the hell is in the water here?” John asked the apartment. Thankfully, it didn’t answer. He was belatedly glad that Jesse was somewhere else—probably doing his lab tests with Carson, come to think of it—and hadn’t been eavesdropping. Jesse’s crush on Granger was practically visible from space (literally, if you counted the Leviathan), and John doubted that Jesse (or Jesse’s accidental magic) would have thought very highly about John and Morris conspiring to make a fool out of her.

Tomorrow. He’d tell Jesse tomorrow, when he had backup in the form of Rodney and at least two of the Jesse Watch. Now that the most urgently needed stop-gaps had been put into place, everything could wait until tomorrow.

Rodney was coming back tomorrow.

Rodney would come up with something to pull their asses out of the fire when he got back—Rodney usually did. (Except for when he made things worse. But that was a one in a million probability. John wasn’t worried. Or, he hadn’t been, until he’d started thinking about it.)

“Fuck,” he muttered again, leaning back into the couch. (It was a good thing they didn’t have a swear jar in the apartment.) This day. He’d done enough. John just _could. not. deal._ with anything else, not today. He pinged Lorne to let him know that the city was _his_ problem for the rest of the day, ordered his 2IC to order his 3IC to take a fucking nap, hauled himself up to take one of the painkillers Carson had prescribed him, and dragged himself into his bedroom with a golf magazine he snagged from the coffee table. He’d just sleep until it was tomorrow. It was a totally healthy, adult way of dealing with this shitshow. Atlantis disagreed, but John didn’t care. He was already drifting.

***

 _God, you’re a sight for sore eyes,_ John thought, and let himself have a moment to just take in the changes in Rodney.

This time, unlike the last coma (the fact that there’d even been a ‘last coma’ made John angry. Or was it nauseous? His body couldn’t seem to decide), Rodney seemed to have gained weight rather than lost it. He looked much healthier than he had the last time John saw him, and more like the Rodney that John remembered. _Though that could just be that absent/fonder thing,_ he reminded himself. He struggled to remember what the rest of the quote was, or where it was from, before he just gave up. Rodney had spotted him and was staring back at John, grinning goofily.

“Don’t you just want to smoosh their faces together and say ‘Now kiss!’ sometimes?” John overheard someone say, a woman, though he couldn’t figure out where it’d come from.

“Not as much as I like to imagine their sex life,” someone answered her, and the two women snickered quietly, muttering about arms, and asses, and… hair? Okay, then. Each to their own.

John gave the crowd a cursory glance, but dismissed it. The Jumper bay was remarkably crowded with people waiting to welcome Rodney back—or to complain all the things that had broken while he was gone that no one else could fix, including the ‘gate (as far as they all knew, though Atlantis had assured John that she could walk him through the repairs if there was an emergency and it was necessary. Jesse probably wouldn’t even need her help).

Regardless, someone else’s private conversation wasn’t any of John’s business, even though he was close enough to overhear it in the crowded room, considering it obviously wasn’t something about or directed at him. John, thankfully, was still not in a relationship, so the women were talking about someone else. _And it better not be Rodney,_ he heard himself thinking, confusingly. _Probably because all his relationships end in someone leaving Atlantis,_ John reasoned. He had enough trouble right now, and adding in Rodney’s latest relationship drama would probably be the straw that broke Atlantis’s back—though it’d end up being John’s back, the way things were going for him lately.

Atlantis swamped him with a wave of irritation. _Sorry,_ he sent back preemptively but sincerely. He might not know what he’d done, but if there was one thing he’d learned from his disastrous marriage with Nancy that’d stood him in good stead ever since, it was apologize early and often, regardless of what you thought you had or hadn’t done. _I love you?_ he added hopefully. Atlantis covered him with amused condescension, and he felt her turn her attention on someone else. Well. That was… weird. John shook it off and limped over to greet Rodney.

“I come back and you’re broken again. Is this a pattern? Should I be worried? Have you started some extreme version of cutting when I’m not around?” Rodney mocked him half-heartedly, eyeing the hated cane.

“Not again, just ‘still,’” John retorted. “While you were off taking your space nap, we were dealing with the same old shitty galaxy, which my leg didn’t exactly appreciate.”

“So I hear,” Rodney sighed, eyes sparkling with eagerness to get back into the swing of things. “What do you want me to fix _now_?”

John would be fucking thrilled to oblige Rodney with an extremely detailed answer—somewhere with a few less curious ears. “The ‘gate, preferably. But that can wait till tomorrow, after you’ve been debriefed. My quarters? You missed out on a lot while you were sleeping,” he said, trying to stay circumspect, not wanting to not start any rumors about some new disaster, excluding the broken ‘gate, that Command was keeping top secret.

Someone snickered, and John rolled his eyes. Was this the new social hotspot, or something? Couldn’t they take their gossip somewhere else? Somewhere, for instance, that wasn’t full of Jumpers and drones and might need to be mobilized in seconds if the Wraith popped up—though he guessed the Leviathan orbiting the planet would probably be an excellent early warning system and first defense, if it ever came to that.

“Yes, Doctor McKay is back,” John said to the room at large, using his Commander of Atlantis voice (also known as his ‘Dad voice,’ according to Jesse). “Yes, it’s wonderful. You can all bitch at him tomorrow after he’s debriefed, been filled in and had some fucking rack time.” The snickers spread to fill the hangar, weirdly, but everyone started drifting toward the doors.

John turned back to Rodney and raised his eyebrows. Rodney had a hand covering his face and was shaking his head slowly. “What?” John asked, confused.

“Nothing,” Rodney said, his voice tight and weirdly high, like he was trying not to laugh. Seriously, what was funny? It was just a crowd of irritated people in a hangar. Rodney cleared his throat. “Nothing,” he repeated himself, dropping his hand from his face and sounding much more normal. “Lead the way, Colonel,” he said mockingly, glancing down at John’s cane.

“I’ll lead your way, asshole,” John muttered. Rodney coughed tightly, then stepped out in front of John to take point on the way back to John’s apartment. John fought the urge to ‘accidentally’ bang Rodney’s legs with his cane—though not as hard as he probably could have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My 2am math skills (immediately following the hubris of John's comment of 'the math was easy', which I even knew at the time was going to jinx me), have since been corrected. The population of the Wizarding world is two hundredths of a percent of the world's population, not two millionths of a percent. Hilariously, the part that tripped me up was MOVING THE DECIMAL TO MAKE IT A PERCENT. Those sorts of things were why switching to an English major from math and physics made my life SO MUCH EASIER and much less stressful :/ (Differential calculus? No prob. Integral calculus? Failed it two fucking times in a row, and I STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY.)


	26. In which Hermione gets told off

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine Rowena's voice as sounding a lot like Rachel Weisz's.
> 
> Mentions of 9/11, 7/7, terrorism, genocide, colonization of America. Be warned of triggers.

HERMIONE

Earlier that morning, Drake had tracked Hermione down to deliver a request from Colonel Sheppard to report to his quarters for a meeting a few hours later. Drake had looked a little frazzled and a lot exhausted, and Hermione had figured that something in the military side of Atlantis was going tits up, so she hadn’t pressed him for detail before letting him run off to check some other task off his list. She’d just hoped ‘nap’ was one of the items on his list he was going to check off soon.

She’d worked herself into quite a state by the time she was due in the Colonel’s quarters for the meeting. The anticipation was practically killing her. **Do you think Doctor McKay got to keep his magic?** she asked Rowena excitedly. **Maybe he wants to collaborate! The work he’d managed before his coma with the energy readings of active magic was very intriguing.**  Hermione’s excitement apparently translated to ‘shouting,’ her primary problem with the Leviathan telepathy; she could tell by the way Rowena’s presence faded in the sort of mental wince Hermione was getting sadly used to. She still couldn’t tell when she was shouting or when she was whispering, and was trying to convince Rowena to talk to her through a radio or earbud when Hermione wasn’t in Rowena. Annoyingly, Rowena just kept telling her that the practice would do Hermione good.

 **I wouldn’t get your hopes up, dear,** Rowena told her pessimistically. Rowena had been in a mood all morning, but had refused to explain why.

“I gave them a day’s grace,” Colonel Sheppard was muttering to himself as he answered the door to his quarters. “Why the fuck– Deputy Prime Minister, come in please,” he interrupted himself to greet her.

“You know how those two are,” Doctor McKay, Colonel Sheppard’s partner, said offhandedly from the seating area across the room. “You, come sit,” he told Hermione, waving her into in the couch across from his armchair. His eyes were sparkling eagerly, and Hermione’s mind exploded with speculation regarding what this was all about. She hoped– “Just how stupid are you, really?” Doctor McKay asked her bluntly, completely derailing her train of thought.

Hermione pulled back, startled and offended. “I beg your pardon?” she asked blankly.

“I mean, you’re already wasting yourself in politics—mundane politics, even, not whatever bastardized system your magical world has going on—so I have to conclude that you’re just a fucking idiot,” McKay said calmly. He was even smiling a little, like he was having fun.

Hermione bristled with rage, but he started speaking again as soon as she managed to open her mouth to reply. “I assume you’ve seen how people react to terrorists, or even suspected terrorists. The U.K. had 7/7 just a few years after the U.S. had 9/11. Your military forces are in the Middle East just like the United States’ are, fighting losing wars against invisible enemies and emerging terrorist organizations.” He paused again, but Hermione knew now that there was no point in formulating a response yet, not until he’d gotten to his point. He’d just talk over her again. She waited, narrowing her eyes, feeling her lips thin with bitten-back anger.

Doctor McKay nodded at her. “And yet you decided it’d be a fucking brilliant idea to reveal the presence—on an international, inter-galactic, top-secret military base—of something that at first glance appears to be a sleeper cell of people with unknown supernatural abilities. You’re lucky you weren’t lynched in the middle of your little show. And how, exactly, did you expect it to go when the news got back to Earth? Or were you just _not thinking?_ ” he leaned over the coffee table to growl at her.

Hermione glanced away from Doctor McKay. Colonel Sheppard leaning casually against the back of Doctor McKay’s chair, the Colonel’s arms folded and eyes steady on Hermione. He was no less intimidating for Hermione’s knowledge that the way he was leaning was so he could keep his weight off his recently re-re-injured leg. She quickly looked back to Doctor McKay, but Colonel Sheppard took the opening she’d inadvertently given him.

“You realize that as soon as I—or any of Atlantis’s men or women—report back to Stargate Command on Earth, the President of the United States will know about magic?” Colonel Sheppard asked flatly. “Maybe that’s not a big deal, maybe he already knows. But everyone in the rank structure between the general in charge of Stargate Command up to the Secretary of Defense—and the Vice President, the whole fucking Cabinet—will also know about magic now. And they’ll be afraid.”

Doctor McKay picked up as soon as Colonel Sheppard left off. “Do you know what powerful people do when they’re afraid? They hit the thing that scares them as hard as they can, trying to get rid of it before it hurts them.”

“Sixty million people died in World War Two, and everyone noticed. Roughly 109 thousand people died in Iraq during the war between ‘04 and ‘09. Something like 66 thousand of that number were civilians. I bet your country cared about that just as much as mine did, which was not a whole fucking lot—they were all terrorists, right? Even the civilians who’d never touched a gun in their lives; they were different, and they were more like the terrorists than they were like us. I was there; I know they weren’t. Can you honestly tell me that you didn’t, then? That you didn’t think that just maybe someone knew better than you? Even though you weren’t sure they were right?” Colonel Sheppard pointed out. Hermione blanched; she could see where this was going.

“And remember, the country with the most presence in the Stargate Program is the one that started practicing genocide around 500 years ago, on its indigenous population. The magical population worldwide is less than two million,” Doctor McKay said evenly. “That’s a number much closer to 109 thousand, or even 66 thousand, than it is 60 million, and it’s scattered all over the globe, not even congregated in a single country. It might not even make the world news, if they went about it carefully enough.”

“People aren’t like that, they’re smart,” Hermione argued weakly. “The U.K., the U.N., they wouldn’t stand for it.” She could feel herself shaking, and she didn’t know if it was with rage or terror.

“But are you willing to bet your people’s civilization on the empathetic capabilities of men and women who fought and clawed and backstabbed their way up the political ranks? Or on men or women who have been conditioned their whole adult lives to obey orders and question them later, if at all?” Colonel Sheppard asked, almost gently, though the steel in his posture and in his eyes gave him away.

“Someone would stand up and say ‘this isn’t right,’ and people would listen,” Hermione argued, remembering her own war.

“And how many do you think would die before people started to listen?” Doctor McKay asked curiously, with nothing else in his tone. Like it was an academic question. Like it didn’t matter.

“My son, for one,” Colonel Sheppard answered Doctor McKay for her, both their eyes still fixed on Hermione. “You. Major Morris. Sergeants Markham and Stackhouse. Rodney. The Leviathan, probably. Everyone on Atlantis. Your friends and family back on Earth. Just to start,” he listed them off coldly.

“Anyone who could be considered be a sympathizer, even if they weren’t actually magical themselves,” Doctor McKay added. “With one good argument, the world could be swayed against you for long enough that it might not matter when that someone stood up and said ‘this isn’t right,’ because the ‘muggles,’ as you call them, would have already committed genocide.”

“Stop,” Hermione said softly, but they listened. She took a deep breath. “That’s a worst-case scenario.”

“We’re used to those out here,” Doctor McKay said wryly, with a twisted smile. Colonel Sheppard nodded once, sharply, keeping his eyes fastened on her.

Hermione began to wonder if he was afraid that she was going to go for her wand, and that fear—aimed at her—from someone she’d never hurt or even offended, from someone who’d respected her judgement and trusted her just a few days ago– It shook her down to her core.

“Even one preventable death is one too many,” Colonel Sheppard said evenly. It should have been a non sequitur, but Fred Weasley’s face (which was also George’s, plus an ear) flashed through her mind. It was quickly followed by a litany of her dead, of all the people she hadn’t saved by being quicker, smarter, faster, cleverer, braver than she’d been during the war.

She drew in a shaky breath. “I know what you’re doing,” she made herself say it as evenly as they’d been keeping their voices, despite the way hers wanted to crack and waver. “I understand the point you’re trying to make. Stop now.” She stood up, keeping herself together. _Just for a little bit longer,_ she promised herself. “We can resume this discussion later. I’m leaving now.” Neither of them moved to stop her as she exited Colonel Sheppard’s quarters and headed for the closest transporter.

 **Rowena,** she whispered shakily in her own head.

 **I’m here for you, dear,** Rowena—the friend of her heart, the one who was quickly supplanting Harry and Ron’s tie for ‘best’—whispered back. Hermione let herself weep for her dead in the privacy of her own mind, enveloped and comforted by the weight of her friend’s mind twisted throughout hers, and walked straight-backed and dry-eyed through the corridors of Atlantis until she reached the east pier and could step into Rowena’s welcoming, safe interior.

***

During Rowena’s experimental decorating spree, she’d haphazardly pockmarked the floor—thankfully, just one corner of the room Hermione spent most of her time in—with spongy, vibrantly colored pockets, which were like a three-way cross between a hole in the ground, an armchair, and a spongy beanbag chair. They only required a little contortion to be immensely comfortable. The ‘seating area’ just reinforced the way Hermione had begun thinking of the room as a cross between the Gryffindor common room and the spaceship bridges she’d seen on the telly when she was small.

Rowena didn’t have the arms to hug Hermione, but curling up in one of Rowena’s seating pockets was almost as good as a firm hug. Hermione huddled in her seat, knees against her chest and arms wrapped around them, and wallowed in self-pity.

Rowena didn’t let her wallow long. “I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,’” she said, her speakers’ volume low, “But I’m not going to take your side either.”

“Aren’t you supposed to support me and tell me everyone else is an arsehole and to stand strong? Isn’t that what friends are supposed to do?” Hermione complained. She’d only ever had Harry and Ron for best friends, and when it came to comfort, they were… really, very awkward. They tended towards awkward pats on the shoulder, the aforesaid encouragement, and subsequent running away.

“Did you forget the argument we had before you stormed out of here to do exactly what I cautioned you not to?” Rowena asked wryly. “You ignored the advice of someone whose species has been hunted and persecuted and tortured for millennia, for many of the same reasons yours went into hiding. My heart lives in you, dear, but that doesn’t mean we’re always going to agree on everything.”

Hermione’s heart sank. She’d disregarded Rowena’s advice as being too cautious and overly paranoid, but the telling off she’d just had from Colonel Sheppard and Doctor McKay made her realize exactly how much she’d trivialized Rowena’s situation. Imagining that happening to her own people… Well, she suddenly understood Rowena’s position on the topic much better.

She just couldn’t do anything right.

“But I _will_ always be here for you, no matter what,” Rowena soothed her. “Yes, you ignored reasonable advice and common sense. Yes, you made a mistake, a big one even. But it hasn’t had the time yet to supernova into the disaster you’re probably imagining. You’ve told the people of Atlantis, but it hasn’t gone further than that. Kilgharrah says that Atlantis shut down the ‘gate at Colonel Sheppard’s request during your lecture; the news won’t get back to Earth until a solution is found. Now, are you content to let other people find the solution for you, or are you going to help fix this?” Rowena asked.

“Fix it, of course,” Hermione replied bitterly. She knew Rowena was trying to cheer her up, but Hermione didn’t want to be cheered up. She didn’t deserve to be, not yet. She angrily wiped away a few of the tears that had snuck out of her eyes.

“It’s not so urgent you can’t take the time to be certain of yourself. I won’t think less of you if you have a good cry,” Rowena’s voice was soft and smiling. “It might make you feel better, and it’s always best to start with a clean slate, isn’t it?”

It was like Rowena’s support opened the floodgates. The boys had always been uncomfortable when she’d cried back in school, so she’d gotten in the habit of forcing her tears back, or hiding when she couldn’t stop it. It had always made her feel weak when rage or frustration made her eyes water, which just compounded the situation—but being able to trust that Rowena wouldn’t think any less of her made it feel like a release, rather than just another thing going wrong in an already awful situation.

“Right,” Hermione said after just a few minutes. Her tears had stopped sooner than she’d expected, and she actually felt slightly better. It was… new. She was still angry, though, and tired of feeling angry at herself. She wanted to yell at someone so she could just get it out of her system, but didn’t really feel that yelling at Rowena would do anything but make everything worse. “You told me not to get my hopes up this morning, when I was on my way to see Colonel Sheppard and Doctor McKay. Did you know what was going to happen? How?”

“Kilgharrah is in the meld again,” Rowena reluctantly reminded her after a moment.

“So Drake knew,” Hermione confirmed. That git hadn’t run away after delivering the message because was busy—he’d known what she was going to be walking into, and must have felt guilty.

“The Colonel spoke with him yesterday, during your lecture,” Rowena agreed. “You knew he didn’t agree with your plans,” Rowena said pointedly, but Hermione waved her off.

“He could have warned me,” Hermione muttered, climbing out of the pocket she’d been curled in. “Where is he now, do you know?”

“He’s on Kilgharrah,” Rowena said warningly, “don’t–” Hermione ignored her, because she was already exiting the airlock she’d been using as a front door.

Conveniently, the pier had long-since cooled in the four days since the dramatic return of the Leviathan, so the short walk from Rowena to Kilgharrah no longer necessitated the use of a shield charm. So far, Kilgharrah’s repairs had mostly been invisible to the eye, since the atmosphere meant he hadn’t had to prioritize his hull or life support, and the large tear in his hull that Drake had initially made was still gaping, though slightly more conveniently sized. Hermione assumed Kilgharrah was working with what he had, and that it would eventually become an airlock like Rowena’s.

Hermione was already worked up and shouting as she climbed into Kilgharrah. “You’re such a git, Drake Black Morris! I can’t believe you. How could you let me walk into that with no warning? You arse–” she broke off when her eyes adjusted to the dimness inside Kilgharrah and she could see Drake as more than just a dark mass against the light coming in through the gashes in Kilgharrah’s hull.

Drake was kneeling in the center of Kilgharrah’s single cavernous room on this level, his hands flat against Kilgharrah’s floor, a dim shimmer covering his hands and sinking into the floor. “What are you doing? Your energy levels can’t have recovered enough for that yet!” Hermione exclaimed.

“You sound like Kill,” Drake laughed, but it was a harsh, cracked sound instead of his usual breathless chuckle.

The closer Hermione came to Drake, the better she could make out his unusually pronounced paleness and the dark circles under his eyes. “You look awful,” she said flatly. It wasn’t hard to let go of her anger when he looked like he was about to tip over.

“You’re a charmer, you are,” Drake told her absently, pulling his hands away from the floor and shaking them out. Hermione was relieved to see the shimmer fade, but it didn’t make him look any better. “Just a little run-down, is all. I’m fine,” he reassured her, but she noticed the way he wobbled a little in the process of getting to his feet, even though he didn’t seem to.

She tucked herself under the arm he’d flung out to stabilize himself as he started to tip. “You’re coming with me,” she said firmly. “You can have a nice lie-down in one of the beds Rowena’s experimenting with”—there was a room that was full of just them right now. Wandering into it on accident had made Hermione flash back to trying to use the Room of Requirement while short on sleep—“and rest while I–”

“I don’t need a nap, I’m fine,” Drake interrupted her gruffly, taking back his arm. “I’m due to meet Ronon in the gym to assess the new personnel’s hand-to-hand; I was just taking a few spare minutes to give Kill a hand with his repairs.”

“And now you sound like me,” Hermione said tartly, crossing her arms and glaring at Drake. She wondered if this was what Rowena had felt like when Hermione had brushed her off yesterday. “Ignoring the very reasonable advice to use your bloody common sense because you think you know better.”

Drake glared back at her.

Hermione huffed out an exasperated breath, sending a few escaped wisps of hair flailing wildly around her face. “Alright then. If you must refuse to be reasonable and rest, you could at least focus on the bigger problem here and help me figure out how to fix the mess I’ve made.” At least that was something he could do sitting down, not trying to dodge punches and karate chops, or whatever ‘assessing the new personnel’s hand-to-hand’ entailed.

“Colonel Sheppard and McKay talked to you?” Drake asked warily.

“Oh, they talked to me alright,” Hermione muttered darkly, shifting her glare to Kilgharrah’s nearest surface. It might not be fair to blame the Leviathan for talking Atlantis into letting Hermione do what she wanted (as Rowena had implied during their argument before Hermione’s lecture), but Hermione didn’t let that stop her.

“Er. Perhaps we should discuss your ideas with them, then,” Drake said, suddenly very suspiciously compliant, and held out his arm to accept the offer of support that he’d just refused.

 _Well, I’m not going to look gift Marines in the mouth–_ Hermione grimaced. Unfortunate metaphor, that, considering Drake’s apparent complete refusal to acknowledge that they’d ever slept together. She’d have to do something about that soon, because it’d only been five days of forced normalcy, even if they’d been filled with emergencies and disasters, but it was already getting very, very old.

“I suppose,” she agreed half-heartedly, forcing herself to save all that for later.

Hermione didn’t really want to see Colonel Sheppard or Doctor McKay so soon after being told off—even though wanting to avoid them made her feel like a recalcitrant child—but she was going to have to face them again sooner or later, and sooner was better if it got all this sorted faster.


	27. In which it's Drake's turn for an F-bombing offensive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A month (almost exactly) since I picked this up again, it's now unbelievably over 100k, and we're closing in on the end! I'm estimating somewhere between 5-8 more chapters. :D
> 
> I hope you're not offended by language: Drake Morris is a US Marine having a very trying day.

MORRIS

Drake wished people would stop fucking telling him that he fucking needed to take a fucking nap.

He was tired, he was run-down, and he wanted to sleep for a week—but a nap wasn’t going to solve shit. He’d gone on less sleep than this before (in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the field offplanet, as a voluntary subject in SGC science experiments with alien technology), and people’d still trusted him with Humvees, tanks, assault rifles, and fucking _alien technology_.

But Atlantis was fucking filled with mother hens. Drake couldn’t even get any respite inside his own head, because Kilgharrah and Atlantis herself were the worst of the lot.

So, yeah. Skiving off to take a nap when there was shit to be done wasn’t happening, and—as much as he’d begun daydreaming about it in the past few days—neither was sleeping at night. It’d be lovely, but for every coming night in the foreseeable future, Drake had committed himself to being chained to his commanding officer’s couch.

It wasn’t volunteering for the night watch that was keeping him up; Drake knew he didn’t have to stay awake. Atlantis would wake him in a second if Jesse’s accidental magic flared up (she was the unacknowledged MVP of Jesse Watch). He wasn’t even staying in the same room as Jesse; the couch was just so he’d be able to get to and protect the kid (and everyone else) quicker than from his own quarters. The discomfort of the Colonel’s couch could have been a contributing factor, but it wasn’t. Not really. Drake had slept like a baby on beds of sharp rocks, when every muscle ached, and he was sunburned and sandchafed in places he hadn’t imagined possible before shipping out.

The thing keeping him up and hyper-vigilant—something he knew was wearing on him—was being in someone else’s space. (Knowing it was his boss’s boss’s couch he’d been surfing for the past four nights didn’t help.) Drake had to remember, every second, no matter how tired he was, that anyone could walk in at any time and _not_ be a threat. He couldn’t even rely on the comfort of having his sidearm close at hand while he was unconscious, because he’d locked it in the Colonel’s gun safe. Partly because Jesse was an intelligent and insatiably curious five(ish)-year-old, partly on the off-chance that Drake would wake up from a flashback already shooting if Jesse or the Colonel startled him in the middle of the night.

He’d managed to deal with all that and still sleep in other people’s quarters before, but those were special circumstances (a common factor being the shot of dopamine to his brain right before passing out after sex).

And while, logically, he knew he could assign the night shift to any of the Marines or civilians on Jesse Watch—he could even split it between a handful of them so none of them would be short on sleep—Drake just couldn’t bring himself to trust anyone but himself with the job.

It wasn’t that Drake didn’t have confidence in them. He just knew he’d be better.

Plus, Colonel Sheppard had heavily hinted that he wouldn’t be comfortable with any of the others on Jesse Watch in his quarters overnight. Drake couldn’t let Jesse have anything less than the best—he was his commanding officer’s kid, the kid who’d lured the Leviathan to Atlantis with his superpowered magic, the person who was ultimately if indirectly responsible for Kilgharrah being alive and being in Drake’s life.

So Drake was dealing. Shit would calm down eventually.

Until that happened, he wasn’t about to dump any of his duties and responsibilities on Colonel Lorne, who always ended up being the one to pick up the slack—especially since Colonel Lorne was already swamped, trying to do most of Colonel Sheppard’s job as well as his own while Sheppard swanned in and out of the infirmary every few minutes, refusing to accept that he wouldn’t heal faster just because he wanted to. Colonel Sheppard approached everything having to do with magic with more wariness than enthusiasm, so at least Drake didn’t have to worry that Sheppard would get the bright idea to ask his five-year-old son (who, as smart as he was, didn’t know anything about biology) to muck around with his healing process. Luckily, it was unlikely that Colonel Sheppard would even think of it, with the way he always put Jesse first and flatly refused to ever let anyone exploit the kid.

Draining himself over and over again to get Kilgharrah back on his (metaphorical) feet was something else that wasn’t helping Drake get any less run-down or exhausted. He couldn’t not, though, because Kilgharrah’s pain was Drake’s pain. Drake just wanted it to stop, and for his lolcat-dragon to heal up and be able to launch and talk and fight and dance through the stars again, like in all the memories he’d shared with Drake when they were one mind.

Anything Drake could do to speed that process up, he would do, and fuck the haters. **That’s right,** he told Kilgharrah preemptively, **don’t be a hater.**

 **Not hater. Also not Kill. Why you call me Kill with face-words?** Kilgharrah whined. **Am Kilgharrah, great dragon, not verb. Is good verb, but not me.**

 **‘Kill’ sometimes means ‘yes’ or ‘good’ when you’re talking to Marines. You’re my _good_ , so it feels right,** Drake offered, shrugging.

 **Yes, am best.** Kilgharrah’s delighted arrogance washed over Drake. **Will allow.**

Drake shoved back at the wave of emotion Kilgharrah was trying to topple him with, playing, and felt himself thud back into the physical world abruptly. The well of his magic that he was feeding into Kilgharrah was starting to run dry—after that first time, Kilgharrah had started booting Drake out of the meld before Drake gave Kilgharrah the last drop of it. These sessions were getting shorter and shorter, lately; his magic wasn’t replenishing itself as quickly between sessions anymore. Drake pulled his hands away from Kilgharrah’s floor and shook out the pins and needles side-effect that came from letting raw magic drain through his hands without shaping it. **I guess that’s all I’ve got for now. You concentrate on triaging your most critical systems, yeah?**

 **Give too much, always,** Kilgharrah grumbled, suddenly drowning Drake with concern rather than arrogance, but pulled back from their conversation to pour himself into his skin and comb through his systems.

And then, whoa.

Holy shit.

Granger came out of fucking _nowhere_.

And was suddenly talking to him. How long had that been going on?

 **When the fuck did Granger get here?** Drake asked, but Kilgharrah was distracted with his triaging and didn’t answer.

Granger kept talking. Drake replied absently, but he was devoting most of his attention to racking his memory for all the steps leading up to him being right here in this moment—he could track his actions and the events leading to this moment back as far as roughly a week before Colonel Sheppard first announced the approach of the Leviathans, which was a firm argument for reality.

But when Drake finally started actually listening to her, she was following the same fucking script as every fucking nag on Atlantis: “Blah blah blah awful blah blah look so tired, blah blah take a nap,” and it wasn’t reassuring.

Having everyone telling him the same thing over and over again for the past few days only amped up his paranoia. The common script could mean one of two things: He’d been dreaming for an unprecedentedly long time and his subconscious was _finally_ starting to sense something was off; or that Drake was awake, and he just looked really fucking tired.

It was probably the latter, but he couldn’t help being suspicious. His early years with the SGC had been exceptionally unusual, even by the SGC’s standards. And Drake’s current reality (Magical sentient telepathic dragon-loving spaceships inexplicably wanting to bond with his brain? Having sex with Granger? Granger being on Atlantis at all? Atlantis herself?) was not actually an awesome argument for its own authenticity.

But either way—if someone was fucking with his head or if this was all real—Drake knew the best course of action was to play along. Someone would slip up eventually or Drake would find a way to determine whether his reality was real.

Kilgharrah’s attention suddenly snapped back to focus on him, and Drake felt the weird tickling inside his head that meant Kilgharrah was skimming his surface thoughts.

 **Am not _figment_ ,** Kilgharrah complained, sounding tremendously insulted.

 **Sorry, buddy,** Drake apologized, **but you’d say that even if you were just my imagination.** Drake refused to contemplate the possibility that Kilgharrah himself could be a particularly imaginative combination of extractor and forger. Even if Kilgharrah wasn’t real, he was Drake’s. Drake knew that much for certain. **I’m not going to do anything drastic, even if I think I’m sure.** He’d seen and heard of those nightmares, and that wasn’t going to be him. Better to just live the dream, even if he _was_ certain it was one. **Just let me figure this out on my own, yeah? Don’t go tattling to Rowena or Atlantis or anyone else. If I’m wrong, this is all classified. No one here has clearance for more than rumors or hypotheticals; they’re not allowed to know.**

 **Must make things difficult, always, little leg people,** Kilgharrah grumbled with reluctant acceptance. **Is because can’t fly or talk proper proper with brain. Legs and face-words complicate tiny worlds.** Drake couldn’t help his wash of amusement, but didn’t let it stop him from shuffling Kilgharrah to the back of his mind and focusing on Granger.

Despite Granger’s visible apprehension, Drake got her to agree to another meeting with the Colonel and McKay—if this was all real, then solving _that_ particular problem was exactly what they should be doing. If it wasn’t? Well, it certainly wouldn’t hurt, considering he was planning on sticking it out anyway.

***

 **Colonel Sheppard’s living room is apparently the go-to place for confidential meetings, these days,** Drake thought at Kilgharrah. Granger was in the middle of suggesting they Obliviate the entire base.

 **Because legs must insist on use face-words,** Kilgharrah grumbled, even though Drake could tell he was eavesdropping intently. Drake took the hint and refocused on the external conversation.

“No,” Colonel Sheppard said flatly. “Like I told Major Morris, I’m not condoning mass nonconsensual brain damage of the city’s personnel. Our tentative plan is to discredit you by finding or making up an Ancient device, maybe a prototype for the ascension machine McKay had a run-in with. It would have given you some sort of superpowers—telekinesis, telepathy, increased brain function, et cetera—and accompanying delusions to explain the ‘history of magic’ lecture and demonstration you gave the base.”

Granger looked dubious. Drake was considering explaining that it wouldn’t affect any respect she’d earned from the personnel, but McKay spoke up before he could.

“Obviously not. She hasn’t shown any of the symptoms, and people will have been watching after her little reveal. She hasn’t been here long enough for it to have been a slow progression. Plus, she still doesn’t have the clearance to even touch anything or go anywhere beyond the public areas without a guard. Mass hallucination is out too, before anyone suggests it,” McKay said absently, tapping at something on his screen. When the rest of them paused to consider the possibility, he made a disgusted face at whatever he was working on. “Too many Whovians on base. We tell them some device or chemical caused mass hallucinations—despite that epidemic of amnesia, what was it, seven years ago?—and everyone’s first thought is going to be ‘mass hallucinations caused by WiFi’ and get suspicious. So, no. Next?” he explained derisively, still concentrating on his datapad.

Drake could feel Kilgharrah’s curiosity and, rather than explaining, connected him to Atlantis. She had the complete Doctor Who oeuvre on her servers, a necessity on an extra-galactic spaceship full of geeks. Being a router for the process of copying it in its entirety from Atlantis’s memory banks to Kilgharrah’s own was guaranteed to be less distracting than trying to coherently explain the show’s intricacies while also trying to follow a separate, very disparate, external conversation.

“We don’t have any way to enforce non-disclosure agreements before they’re broken, so they’re a punishment that deters rather than prevents,” Colonel Sheppard said after a moment, apparently thinking out loud. “If there was a way we could make them actually effective as a preventative measure, that’d be what we need. With the Leviathans hanging around, total nondisclosure isn’t really a tenable option. Even if we suppress it now, they’re not going away. But if we can somehow make sure the knowledge stays on base…” he trailed off.

“Well, there’s binding magical contracts,” Granger said thoughtfully, “but those have to be individually applied. They also only work on wizards or sentient creatures who are magical in and of themselves, like the Leviathan, or  Veela, or selkies; we could probably figure a way around that, but applying it individually would be a timesuck. On the other hand, an Unbreakable Vow–”

“No,” Drake cut her off harshly, remembering his own vicarious experience with an Unbreakable Vow.

“It sounds promising, ‘unbreakable’ being in the name,” McKay said curiously, finally lowering the datapad he’d been focusing on this whole time.

“It’s called ‘unbreakable’ because if you break it, you die. Basically, a fatal NDA,” Drake explained emotionlessly.

Colonel Sheppard winced. Drake figured he was imagining the many accidental deaths that would result in until people fully comprehended the full extent of the spell’s restrictions. Merlin knew Drake was.

“Right, yes,” Granger agreed apologetically, looking over at Drake with an expression he couldn’t read. Nor was it one he wanted the ability to decipher, right now. He refused to meet her eyes, not allowing her the opportunity for an apology—or legilimency. This was all bringing up a lot of early memories he would much prefer to forget, which was what someone trying to break into his head might do in order to distract him and keep him off balance. Granger just kept watching him, waiting for him to meet her eyes, and a tense silence quickly filled Colonel Sheppard’s living room. Drake couldn’t trust anyone (except Kilgharrah) until he was sure, not even Granger. She’d changed in ways he’d never have expected since school, so he couldn’t be absolutely certain she was actually herself.

“For fuck’s sake, we’re talking about magic, here. Can’t you just wave your little wands and make it so nobody can talk to anybody about it who doesn’t already know?” Colonel Sheppard asked, his exasperation shattering the tension that might have only been in Drake’s mind, from the way none of the others startled like he did.

“Well, there is the option of designating a Secret Keeper,” Granger said thoughtfully.

“Fallible,” Drake shot her down, remembering Pettigrew.

“Fallible, but not breakable,” Granger retorted hotly. “We just have to choose someone with a reason they’d die to protect, rather than someone looking out for his own best interests.” She was obviously remembering Pettigrew as well.

“A Secret Keeper with an Unbreakable Vow?” McKay asked, looking interested.

Granger shook her head. “They’d negate each other. Even if they didn’t, if the Secret Keeper ever had a legitimate or necessary reason to disclose, he or she wouldn’t be able to—for instance, if new personnel came to Atlantis and had to be told, none of the personnel already here would be physically able to tell or write it out, and the Secret Keeper would be obligated to prevent the newcomers from finding out accidentally,” she explained. “No, we just need someone who’d lose everything if the wrong people found out.” She looked like she’d suddenly remembered something once she’d finished speaking, and looked over at the Colonel.

“Jesse,” Colonel Sheppard agreed succinctly. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect him.”

They sat a moment in stunned silence. “Well, that’s sorted, then!” Granger said brightly.

“Hold up,” Drake cautioned. “The Fidelius charm only works on a witch or wizard, you know that.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we do it now,” Granger rolled her eyes, the Little Miss Know-it-all Drake remembered from school making a cameo appearance. “Obviously it will take some experimentation, but I’m sure that with the Leviathans as a resource and the combined power of all the magical folk on base, we’ll be able to work something out fairly quickly.”

“Concentrate on that, then,” Colonel Sheppard ordered. McKay nodded thoughtfully, eyeing the Colonel over the screen of his datapad.

Drake stood, expecting that to be the end of it. Everyone else remained seated, shifting so they could look at him. He sank back down to his seat on the couch, confused.

“Now,” McKay dropped his datapad into his lap and leaned forward to pierce Drake with disturbingly intent eyes. “You.”

“Ominous,” Drake muttered, immediately feeling his face stiffen into a blank mask when he used his ‘face-words’ rather than directing it to Kilgharrah.

“Exactly! That, Major, right there,” McKay pointed at him, “that is not normal. You are sleep-deprived, and I tell you that as someone who knows sleep-deprivation and survives for days at a time on caffeine and physician-prescribed speed during emergencies. This is not an emergency. Why aren’t you sleeping,” he asked flatly, not even making it a question.

Right. Like Drake was going to tell McKay all about his PTSD, let alone in front of his commanding officer and awkward one night stand slash best friend.

Drake clapped his hand over his mouth, but judging from their reactions, he hadn’t said anything out loud this time. Thank Merlin.

 **Thank Kilgharrah,** his brain-dragon said tartly. **I help, but you tell some. Not all, some,** he argued preemptively. **Not dream thing, sleep thing. Need sleep, make energy, both heal faster.**

 **Manipulative,** Drake accused, dropping his hand.

 **Dragon,** Kilgharrah agreed. Drake rolled his eyes at the smug superiority Kilgharrah was practically bathing in.

“Can’t sleep in someone else’s space. Too much to do—don’t have time for a fucking kip, so don’t suggest it,” he admitted, just barely keeping himself from snarling. Yes, Kilgharrah had a point, but that didn’t mean Drake had to like it.

“And that’s how you know you’re sleep deprived,” McKay said disdainfully. “Or an idiot. Everyone’s all spread out across the city now—we’re not crammed into the boarding school's dormitories anymore—and the quarters across the hall from John’s are empty. Move in there. Or you could assign someone else the night watch, and they could stay there.”

“No one else on Jesse Watch can talk to Atlantis–” Colonel Sheppard started to explain.

“She can talk to their devices,” McKay interrupted him scornfully. “Did you all just forget to use common sense while I was gone? I feel like I came back to a lot more stupid than I left.”

The surge of relief Drake felt at the simple solution and lack of invasive questions about why he wasn’t sleeping was counter-intuitively invigorating. The prospect of restful, unbroken sleep in his near future had him on his feet before he knew it. “Permission to–” he started to ask.

“Yes, go. Grab some Marines, get it done,” Colonel Sheppard ordered, actually physically shooing Drake out of his quarters. “Take this, too. I need to talk to Rodney,” he added, gently shoving Granger out after Drake.

Drake and Granger shared a bemused look as the door whooshed shut decisively behind them as soon as they were in the hall. “Sex, you think?” Drake asked, smirking.

“Seemed rather abrupt, otherwise,” Granger agreed, snickering. Drake snorted with sleep-deprivation-induced hilarity.

And then Granger seemed to remember she was trying to apologize to Drake, and Drake remembered he wasn’t looking at Granger because she might have a go at legilimancy, or be trying to con him into spilling all his secrets, or want to talk about that time they accidentally had sex—and everything was back to the awkward status quo they’d forgotten for a brief moment.

“Drake–” Granger started.

“Gotta move house while I’ve got a spare minute. Cheers,” he said over his shoulder, walking quickly away. **Cheers?** he despaired. Kilgharrah laughed at him. **Not helpful.**

Moving his kit took barely any time at all, especially with the transporters shortening the distance considerably. Atlantis’s personnel hadn’t been subjected to weight restrictions on personal items since the early days, but it wasn’t long after he’d left the Manor that Drake had discovered he didn’t have attachments to _things_ , with few exceptions (including his great-aunt’s wand, and the Black signet ring his mother had sent him on his eighteenth birthday). Drake was done moving his quarters across the city in less than half an hour, and most of that had been spent lugging books in and out of the transporters. (Having the ability to shrink down his furniture and stick it in his pockets probably helped as well. He’d have done it with everything, but furniture was plausibly already there, and he didn’t want make his magical status any more obvious than it already was.)

He still had to get through the last eight or so hours of his workday, but the lure of actual sleep at the end of it was an incentive potent enough to help him power through.

***

Drake woke the next morning feeling more alert than he had in almost a week. He knew he’d need more than one night’s rest to catch up his sleep deficit, but he couldn’t bring himself to care at the moment.

 **Dreaming still?** Kilgharrah asked anxiously.

 **Much less convinced, but still a little suspicious,** Drake admitted.

KIlgharrah swamped him with what felt exactly like the emotional equivalent of a heavy sigh, but dropped the subject. **One day break from energy sharing,** Kilgharrah ordered firmly. **Feels much better, must to concentrate on repair thrusters, no interrupts.**

Drake could literally feel the falseness of Kilgharrah’s excuse, but let him have the win. **One day,** he agreed. There was something he had to look into, anyway.

 


	28. In which John gets a clue (but is still an idiot)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently John's so laconic because he uses up all his words inside his head. So many words, you guys. _So many._
> 
> This would have been up earlier, but there was a mission-critical need to reread the entirety of owlet's [Infinite Coffee and Protection Detail](http://archiveofourown.org/series/195689), seeing as there was a _new update_ posted yesterday. You understand. (If you don't, it's because you haven't read it yet. Go do that now, this will wait. I'm serious. _Do it_. Do it **now**.)

JOHN

John spent the night getting Rodney up to speed (while Rodney let Jesse climb all over him and pester him with questions, until Rodney pled exhaustion and escaped the five-year-old terror by fleeing to his own quarters). So it was the day after Rodney got back that he had solutions to pretty much every problem that had been plaguing John during Rodney’s absence.

Though he did create a problem—okay, maybe two—while solving the others.

***

_“Did you all just forget to use common sense while I was gone? I feel like I came back to a lot more stupid than I left.”_

John was never, _never_ going to tell anyone that _that_ was the moment. The _holy shit_ moment. His own personal _Eureka!_

John barely managed to clench his teeth over the instinctual _holy shit I love you_ suddenly overwhelming his entire being. But, unlike the sleep-deprived Major Morris, and despite John’s painkiller regimen, he still had control over what came out of his mouth.

It wasn’t heterosexual panic keeping his mouth shut. He’d never had a problem with ‘alternate’ sexualities. (And if he had, he would have beaten it out of himself after the first time Jesse had let loose the heart eyes on Torren. For a kid who’d barely been able to talk at that point, he’d been pretty fucking obvious about who he had wanted to marry when he grew up. Though lately it’d been a toss-up between Torren and Granger, so who knew.)

So while John hadn’t ever been attracted to a man before, he wasn’t going to let _that_ be an issue. Like _hell_ was he going to set that sort of example for his son to look back on someday. He didn’t want Jesse to be able to use that as evidence if he was ever questioning whether being gay (or bi, or ace, or whatever the hell new sexualities there were by then) was _really_ okay with his father, or if John was bullshitting him.

It wasn’t that John was worried about what his people would say or do if he got with Rodney. The subsection of the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s Article 125, the one that banned homosexuality in the military (and its accompanying ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass)’ amendment—also known as the _It’s okay to not be straight in the service as long as no one finds out, though if they happen to find out they’ll still give you the boot_  amendment), had been repealed by the US government before John even returned to active duty on Atlantis.

(And even if it hadn’t been, it _had_ always been unenforceable within the inter-branch and international nature of the SGC’s forces, enough so that it was one of the clauses that had been thrown out during the IOA’s initial creation and revision of an SGC-specific UCMJ. It had been replaced by the addition of ‘or sexuality or gender identity’ in all relevant paragraphs regarding discrimination.)

It wasn’t even because, as the military commander of Atlantis, John knew that declaring his undying affection for his snarky asshole of a CSO wouldn’t set a good precedent.

No.

John was a decorated officer in the United States Air Force, but he was also someone most of the brass would love to see disappear. As such, and as an officer in a command position on an international base, he knew that his superiors held him to a different—and much more restrictive—code of conduct than the rest of the military, a code he had to abide by if he ever wanted to advance in rank or grade (or retain his current ones).

So, if word got out—and it would, because Atlantis was staffed with incurable gossips—John knew it would end up being just another black mark against him in the minds of the brassholes the next time he got dragged in front of them on some charge or another. One of those unspoken black marks, which don’t show up in a military jacket, but everyone judges by regardless.

Enough of the brass who hated John up in the upper rungs of the service ladder were also bigoted enough to delight in finding some way to use John’s feelings for Rodney against him. They might even find a way to use a relationship with Rodney to declare him unfit for Atlantis. And even in a best-case scenario, if they did let him come back—after whatever hypothetical FUBAR trail they made him stand—they’d find some way to control him through Rodney. Just like General O’Neill still suspected the NID had planned to do with Jesse, if they’d managed to get their hands on him.

So John couldn’t do or say anything about his feelings for Rodney.

But at least John knew now.

He suspected these feelings might have been around for a hell of a lot longer than just a few minutes. _I really never see it coming, do I?_ he asked himself incredulously. _Apparently not even when it’s coming from myself._

But hey, now he wouldn’t have to wonder whether Pegasus had regrown his appendix and subsequently given him a fancy new intergalactic version of appendicitis (though he should probably get Carson to check on that eventually. Just to make sure).

But—this could be good. He could make this work. It could be like one of those chaste, medieval, one-sided ‘courtly love’ deals. He’d go off and fight the enemy (with Rodney by his side) to win his love’s favor (bitchy comments and amused insults, rather than fluttering handkerchiefs or whatever the fuck ‘favors’ were in those days).

Never mind that John rarely got to go out and fight anymore—he didn’t really feel comfortable casting himself as one giving the favors in this imaginary scenario, even though he was the one staying back in the safety of the city and sending his ...Rodney... off to battle. _Either way, it’s a fantasy metaphor I’m making in the privacy of my own mind, so you can stop shoving scenes from Shakespeare movies into my head **any time** now,_ he thought pointedly at Atlantis. _It’s lucky Rodney can’t talk to you. You’re the biggest gossip of them all—I’d never be able to keep this a secret if he could._

For some reason, Atlantis thought that was the opportune moment to suddenly overwhelm John with a swirling tidal wave of emotions too complicated and diverse for him to decipher.

_What the hell is that supposed to mean?_ he asked, startled. Her only response was a light wash of amused resignation over her emotional tsunami as it ebbed away.

***

The other problem, though. That was one he could do something about.

After John kicked Major Morris and the Major’s girlfriend out of his apartment, he faced Rodney and crossed his arms.

_Be stern,_ he reminded himself, _don’t let him talk you out of this._

“You’re not volunteering to be the ‘Secret Keeper’ while Granger’s working on modifying the thing so I can do it,” he said firmly.

“Yes, I am,” Rodney said easily, back to glaring at his datapad like it’d offended him.

“No, you’re not,” John repeated himself, even more firmly.

Rodney rolled his eyes at his datapad. “I’ve got the fancy magic gene now, so it might as well make itself useful. If I do it, we’d be able to communicate with Earth during however long it takes Granger to do what she needs to do—which could take days or weeks, or even months, we have no way of knowing. I can’t exactly jump in and speed the process up; this is an entirely new field for me.” John suddenly wondered if the constant glaring at his datapad this whole time had been Rodney searching Atlantis’s servers for a _So You Want To Be a Wizard 101_ crash course. (Knowing Rodney, he’d probably managed to find or make one and was already halfway through it.)

“You know they would’ve sent the _Daedalus_ or the _Odyssey_ as soon as they couldn’t establish a connection with Atlantis; we don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to innocent technical malfunctions. So I, or Granger or Major Morris—if you want it to stay in the circle of people who already know what you did to the stargate—would have to be made the Secret Keeper anyway when the BC-304 drops out of hyperspace and establishes a sublight comm connection. And, if they show up to check on our nonfunctional stargate and find the planet surrounded by alien ships, you can bet they’ll shoot first and ask questions later, no matter what we say. It’s a textbook example of a foothold situation. So, designating me the Secret Keeper now diminishes the chance anyone will figure out what you did and charge you with mutiny or treason, or that anyone with accidentally declare war on our newfound allies,” he explained absently.

_Stupid Rodney and his stupid logic._ He glowered at the nearest wall when Atlantis’s wave of amusement swamped him. Apparently, John wasn’t going to be able to solve either of the problems Rodney’d created.

That other one, though—that one, he didn’t really want to solve.

“Fine,” John agreed grumpily, still glaring at Atlantis’s wall. “I don’t have to like it though,” he declared vehemently, swinging around to fix his glare on Rodney.

“Do you ever?” Rodney sighed, finally putting down the datapad and meeting John’s eyes.

John wanted to reply defensively, to start one of their infamous bickering arguments that always eventually smoothed everything over, but the look on Rodney’s face stalled him. John stared back at Rodney, not saying anything, while he tried to figure out what was different. Rodney looked tired, _worn_ in a way that John couldn’t really describe, but had nothing to do with Rodney’s physical health.

“What’s up, buddy?” John asked instead, concern derailing his desire to bicker like children, though he forced himself to keep it casual. Couldn’t let Rodney know, after all.

“Buddy?” Rodney laughed. It was a weird sound, not like his usual laugh, but that worn look had disappeared from his eyes. “Has the ratling been watching that dragon training movie on repeat again?

“Uh, maybe,” John hedged. He didn’t know, but dammit, he needed to stop acting weird. Because apparently calling Rodney ‘buddy’ was weird now. “So, since you’re so set on being this Secret Keeper thing, should we get that ball rolling so you can ‘fix’ the gate and we can fend off another intergalactic war?” he deflected.

Rodney gave him a brief, disconcertingly piercing look, but let John change the subject. “Yes, let’s,” he said flatly, though the corner of his mouth was turned up. “Hate to have _another_ when we haven’t even finished the first yet.”

“And when we’d probably end up on the opposite side as the peanut butter and condoms, knowing our luck,” John muttered as he headed for the door, thinking of all the requisitions paperwork Lorne had pushed on him ‘for something to do while you’re convalescing, sir.’ Sure, it had all been his to begin with, before he’d given up and delegated it to Lorne—but for a moment, John seriously considered sticking to his guns and pushing the intergalactic war thing so he wouldn’t have to fill out any more fucking forms.

Rodney made a weird noise, but was fine when John turned and quickly looked him over. A little redder, maybe. “Seriously, are you okay?” John asked again.

“Fine, fine,” Rodney spluttered, distracting John by pushing the cane on him. _Stupid cane._ “Let’s go see Granger and get me all ‘Keeper’ed up.”

‘Keepered up,’ John mouthed back, with raised eyebrows. Rodney scowled at him, and John laughed. “Yeah, fine, whatever. We’ll get it done and then you can fight me for it later,” he agreed wryly, pausing to let Rodney leave the room ahead of him.

_Do I do that normally? Is this weird? I have to act the same, but **how did I act before**?_  John asked himself frantically, but he coolly kept his panic internal, falling back on an old standby to keep Rodney distracted: The long-debated question of who would win in a fight, River Tam or Batman.

It worked like a charm.

Now if only John could distract himself.

***

“There are some things you need to know about the Fidelius charm, first,” Granger warned them when they went to her with their temporary solution.

“It’s a very complicated and intricate spell to cast, especially with the modifications already necessary to protect an idea rather than a place, so I’ll need about a day to prepare—if I’m the one to cast it. Honestly, I’d prefer it be Major Morris, as–,” she interrupted herself. “You see, with the Fidelius charm, the caster plays a more important role in the duration of the charm than in most traditional spells. Also, it’s not infallible, and requires quite a lot of paranoia to remain effective. If the Secret Keeper dies, everyone they told about the secret—or, in this case, everyone who knows the secret already—will become a Secret Keeper themselves. The ‘secret’ dies with the Keeper, but the spell only dies with the caster—or until it’s nullified by the caster, which is why I think you’d want Major Morris, or some other military wizard assigned to the base and who knows how to defend themselves in this galaxy, to be the caster.

“Additionally, when cast, the radius of the spell will need to be modified to include everyone who knows the secret in question or it will be ineffective—that is, if it’s an idea rather than a place. If it’s a physical place or object, then the radius is automatically ‘within sight’ of the thing in question. As well, someone who knows the secret will, on rare occasion,” she grimaced, “be able to accidentally reveal the secret—place, in the unmodified version of Fidelius, though it probably applies to ideas as well—immediately after wormhole travel, if it affects the spell the same way apparition does.”

John made a mental note to ask Morris—much less wordy than Granger—about whatever ‘apparition’ was.

“So, basically,” Rodney said wryly, in that ‘everyone else is too stupid to live’ tone of voice that John apparently loved, despite its complete and utter rage-inducing annoyance in pretty much every other person ever, “the caster should immediately cancel the spell as soon as the Keeper dies, and recast it on someone else in the vicinity as quickly as possible. And from what you’re telling me, a day is about as quick as possible. That seems utterly useless.”

“It’s better than nothing at all, which is what we have at this point!” Granger argued. It looked like it was about to become a scientific throw-down, Rodney’s favorite kind. John’s… less-favorite kind. “I’m already working on modifying the spell, I’m not an idiot. I know that this isn’t the solution we need for this situation—it’s just a stop-gap measure. But we need the stop-gap so we can have the time to find a better solution!” She was waving her arms around as she talked, kinda like how Rodney did.

John took a precautionary step away from them, finding a wall to lean against and take some weight off his leg while he watched the show.

“Even the premise of the spell as it stands—how you explained it anyway—is ridiculously ineffectual for _any_ situation! The death of the Secret Keeper shouldn’t affect it at all for it to be viable, and having the death of the caster essentially invalidate the spell means anyone who knows about it will just be gunning for the caster, because as soon as they’re taken out there’s no spell at all! And I mean, come on! Using a radius at all?” Rodney argued. Cue the expansive gestures. “Why not find some way of designating people, some sort of mark or commonality, that the spell applies to and should affect, and work that into the spell? And modify the casting time—there must be some sort of shorthand language–” John stopped listening when Rodney and Granger got into a theoretical debate regarding something that, even though Rodney knew nothing about, he doubtless had good points regarding.

Or, at least, that seemed to be the general (if unwilling) consensus of everyone in Atlantis’s science department whose project Rodney had ever crashed.

“We need to import more wizards,” Rodney was suddenly right up in John’s face, his eyes fever-bright and intensely blue.

“Why, did you talk Granger to death?” John asked wryly. He couldn’t help the way his eyes darted toward her—just in case—but she was feverishly scribbling something down on a sheet of printer paper, her wild cloud of frizzy hair looking like it was attempting to eat her head and make a bid for sentience itself. She must’ve lost her hair tie sometime during all the vigorous arm waving.

Rodney ignored John. “There’s nothing truly effective–”

“Not _yet_ ,” Granger said grimly over the top of Rodney.

“–so the best solution here is to eventually have Atlantis staffed solely by wizards and people who are already magic-adjacent and know the risks of talking,” Rodney continued, ignoring Granger’s input. “And we’d need more wizards anyway, to partner the all Leviathan we have, let alone any others we can find or rescue.”

“Sold,” John said, visions of his own armada of spaceships dedicated to eradicating the Wraith dancing in his head. They’d need a significant magical population to ensure compatible partnerships (John suddenly wondered if the Leviathan species might be somewhere in the history of that word), but with Atlantis’s magical personnel comprising a tenth, maybe even a seventh, of the city’s population, there should be plenty of magical SGC personnel John could lure to Atlantis with the possibility of a partner _ship_ ( _I’m hilarious, shut up,_ he thought in response to Atlantis’s wave of disgust) of their very own.

He’d have to send someone back to the SGC to spread the news through its underground magical community. Probably Sergeants Markham and Stackhouse; they could talk to the most people without raising suspicion (especially since Morris tethered to Pegasus by his Leviathan).

“I’m gonna have to read O’Neill in if I’m stealing his personnel,” John thought out loud. There were only so many out-of-the-blue requests for transfer the General would approve otherwise.

“He probably already knows,” Rodney said wryly. “I mean, honestly, what better explanation is there for Doctor Jackson, than magic?”

John fought down a consuming wave of seething jealousy and wiped the scowl off his face.

Luckily, Rodney didn’t notice, too busy squabbling with Granger and scribbling on her work. (They’d unearthed a whiteboard from somewhere when John wasn’t looking, and their incomprehensible formulae had grown exponentially.) “I mean, how many times has he ‘died’ and come back to life? Seven, ten—I forget what he’s up to now,” Rodney continued like the pause to bicker hadn’t happened, and even used finger quotes.

John relaxed—Rodney still had only as much reverence for Jackson and his ‘soft sciences’ as he’d ever had. (None.)

He had to get this under control. If John flew off the handle whenever Rodney implied someone was attractive—or when John mistakenly thought Rodney was implying that someone was attractive—John wasn’t going to be able to hide this for very long.

Atlantis plastered an image of Chaya across the backs of John’s eyeballs.

_What does she have to do with anything?_ he asked, annoyed.

Atlantis didn’t explain, flouncing out of his mind in a huff.

“Women,” John muttered, exasperated. Granger and Rodney both stopped what they were scribbling to look at John. He winced and pointed at his head. “Atlantis,” he explained. They went back to what they were doing, though Granger made sure to glare at him first.

Right. She was a woman. Whoops.

“Wait,” John said suddenly, and they turned to look at him in irritated unison. Creepy. “We still need the people already here to keep their mouths shut—I’m not transferring anyone back to Earth just because they’re not wizards,” he said firmly.

Actually firmly this time, not ‘arguing with Rodney’ firmly.

“I can’t pull that bullshit on Atlantis’s personnel. This is their home,” he insisted. “Plus, it’d get rid of most of our ATA-gene carriers. How’ve you kept it secret back on Earth? Maybe that’ll work here?” he asked Granger. “You’ve got those non-magic squids in your community, so you must have something.”

Granger snorted with surprised laughter, then blushed. “Sorry—just, it’s _squib_ ,” she popped the B, “not squids like in the ocean,” she explained. “And it’s basically a load of concealing spells, almost total segregation, and a lot of us being lucky muggles are used to ignoring odd people and strangeness,” she shrugged. “And that muggles love to section anyone who believes in magic,” she added ruefully.

John thumped his head back against the wall. (A few times. It didn’t help.)

“Awesome,” he said flatly. “Let me guess: Whatever you come up with here, you’re gonna bring it back home and implement it there, too.”

Granger smiled absently over her shoulder at John. “I always did want a research position,” she said brightly.

“Well, speed up your stop-gap, then,” John said, resigned. “If it’s temporary, it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ll recall all personnel so they’ll be here tomorrow morning for you to do your thing, and go get Woolsey to draft up another NDA for everyone to sign, so everyone will at least know not to talk about it.” He sighed. “Rodney, can you get the gate fixed by 28:37 local time, so I can make our usual check-in? Doesn’t matter if the Trapper Keeper spell’s done yet, it’ll just be me and O’Neill,” he requested, fleeing the room before either of them could argue.

“It’s _Secret_ Keeper!” Granger yelled down the hall after him.

John resolved to call it the Trapper Keeper spell from here on out.

***

“Yes, recall _all_ off-planet teams and personnel,” John confirmed. Lorne just kept staring at him. “It’s not an emergency, but they all have to be here for the mandatory spell-casting tomorrow,” John explained, still not entirely believing that _that_ was something he was actually saying.

“And Major Morris?” Lorne finally asked.

“What about him?” John frowned.

“He took a Jumper up to the orbiting Leviathan? Said he wanted to talk to the big guy?” Lorne asked (in a way that implied Lorne thought John was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, which, no).

Maybe it was something John was supposed to know about, but he doubted it. “Him too,” John covered for Morris, but made a mental note to rip him a new one for it later. Taking a Jumper up for a joyride in the middle of this shitstorm? Uh-uh.

***

“Sorry about the radio silence, General,” John apologized to O’Neill. “Just a short in the ‘gate, something to do with the control crystals—the details were a little complicated for me. Doctor McKay got it all fixed up, though. But, since it’s working again, feel like taking a little walk through the ‘gate? We’ve got a situation here that I think you’ll want to check out for yourself; it’s one of those ‘you gotta see to believe’ scientific discoveries I think you’ll enjoy.” O’Neill had always enjoyed ribbing John about Jesse’s ‘scientific discoveries,’ so he hoped the General got the implied message that he shouldn’t come loaded for bear.

“Maybe I’ll get the band back together for a reunion tour,” General O’Neill said dryly.

“Jackson would probably get a kick out of it,” John agreed truthfully.

“I’ve gotta escort a frantic muckety-muck through the ‘gate anyway, might as well make it a party. He’s looking for a Deputy Prime Minister that Britain seems to have misplaced; seen any of those lying around?” O’Neill asked sardonically.

Shit. He’d forgotten that Granger was actually a politician and not just a scientist—Magickist? Wizard. Witch. One of those—despite all her protestations about her stay being only temporary. (How did she think she was going to take Rowena back home through the wormhole, anyway?)

“Well, there might be one of those in the science department somewhere, maybe fallen into a research singularity—you know how those guys can get,” John shrugged. It was even true. Sort of. “When should we expect you?”

“I’ll need at least a few hours to get the gang back together, and it’s already the middle of the night for you guys, so say–” O’Neill checked something out of the camera angle, “–about zero seven hundred Atlantis local?”

_Ugh_. So early. “We’ll expect incoming then,” John confirmed, and O’Neill cut the feed before John could salute.

Well, now Granger had a deadline to work with, and John had about seven hours to hunt down his prodigal Major—long since returned to Atlantis, though John hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him—and ask him what the fuck he’d been thinking. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, that _was_ a reference to the Diane Duane book/series (omg the _cats_ ), and to _How To Train Your Dragon_.
> 
> Also, John's mental monologue about sexuality (in general, and specifically the _being gay, or bi, or ace, or whatever the hell new sexualities there were [in the future]_ ) was intended to express John's geezer-like bewilderment with these 'newfangled' labels, rather than self-hate or ingrained prejudice toward the sexualities in question. I apologize if it came off otherwise :/ (Also, keep in mind that John is practically the definition of 'unreliable narrator'.)


	29. In which the Spencers aren't where they're supposed to be

EVAN

There weren't many people who'd been on Atlantis long enough to remember a time before Colonel Evan Lorne had transferred to Pegasus. He hadn't been on the original expedition, but he'd still been here a very long time. Almost ten years now.

He was one of the diehards who'd stuck it out through all the military commanders from Lt. Colonel John Sheppard to Colonel John Sheppard (again), and he'd been the second in command on the military side for almost his whole tenure here (except for that one time when he'd led a mutiny and was temporarily the military commander of Atlantis. The SGC hadn't let him keep the position. The mutiny had probably made them nervous, even though Evan had never been officially reprimanded. It'd been a necessary evil. The guy had, essentially, been the political version of a wraith-worshipper. And a dick).

Evan had been Atlantis's second in command for going on ten years now—even though he'd never wanted to fly a desk.

Evan was built for the outdoors. His hobby was painting landscapes. His degree was in _geology_. He still had his RED HORSE patch (even though it wasn't on his uniform any longer); he was an engineer who specialized in quarry operations.

He'd planned to stay in the field until he died or retired.

And now he had managing the day-to-day minutia of a working military base down to a science, Lord help him.

It was much to Evan's dismay that he now knew there were shortcuts for paperwork, that he knew which forms were crucial and which ones he could blow off for weeks at a time with no consequences; that he knew every one of Atlantis's and the SGC's quartermasters, and all the BC-304 loadmasters by name; that he could remember in a split second if a planet was currently for or against Atlantis's people; that he could schedule any and all of Atlantis's rotas in his sleep and knew all by heart all the people who should never, ever, work together; that Excel was his bitch.

So—as awesome as it was to know the truth about what (and who) was 'out there,' despite how stepping foot on an alien planet or looking up to see two moons still gave his inner child a gleeful shiver every single time—there wasn't a day that Evan didn't wish at least once that he'd said no when the SGC had come recruiting. (He was usually sitting behind his desk when he made the wish.)

But at least he still led AR-2 and got to leave the city occasionally (unlike John, the poor bastard).

So when the commander ran off to find his prodigal brother (dragging Evan's 2IC with him and leaving Evan unsupported), Evan stayed on the city.

Making sure shit still ran smoothly. Like fucking usual.

If Evan hadn't been there to see Colonel Sheppard's reaction when the Spencers were reported MIA at this morning's mandatory—and now temporarily postponed—spell casting ( _what even was his life_ ), he would have suspected that this was all something John had cooked up with his long-lost little brother to get out of having to drop the 'magic is real' bomb on the General.

As it was, Evan was still holding a grudge for the 0400 wake up required to coordinate the mandatory assembly of all of Atlantis's personnel, especially since the 'spell casting' hadn't even happened. Instead, he'd ended up directing all of Atlantis's headless chickens into a coordinated rescue effort and sending them off to search the mainland. While he stayed on the city.

He knew that any discovery of missing personnel would've required him to get up anyway, and that a delayed discovery of their status could mean the difference between recovering people or bodies, but none of that improved his mood.

Neither did being the only one waiting to greet and debrief General O'Neill when the 'gate activated.

But, despite himself, Evan was good at his job, and he had too much pride to do it poorly. So when the 'gate activated, Evan compartmentalized all that and stuffed it down in a little box in his head and locked it up tight.

SG-1 came glooping through the 'gate, and it was like he was back in the SGC and it was a decade and a half ago ( _Lord_ , he was getting old). Well, it was a memory come to life—until the redheaded man in a dress came tripping through the 'gate after them. (Though, honestly, still not that different from Evan's SGC days.)

"Brilliant," the redhead said to himself, looking all around with wide, amazed eyes, and turned to watch the wormhole dissipate.

Evan watched General O'Neill watch the stranger (Evan wasn't sure he could classify the man as a diplomat, with that reaction to the wormhole. Diplomats and politicians usually pretended wormhole travel was no big deal, even if they were 'gate virgins). The General's eyebrows slowly climbed up to and under the brim of his ubiquitous ballcap as he watched the stranger, who must be new to him as well, since General O'Neill was acting like he barely knew him and the rest of the team were ignoring him in that _I've gotta protect you but please God don't talk to me_ way Evan knew so well.

So, so well. David's early days on AR-2 came to mind (back before Evan got to know him better).

Evan didn't know how the General had managed to recall General Carter, Doctor Jackson, and even Teal'c and convince them to come visit Atlantis on a routine escort mission for a politician, but O'Neill had managed it somehow. (Though, from what he knew about Doctor Jackson, the difficulty might be in trying to drag him back to the Milky Way from Pegasus. Maybe the General had asked his old team for support with that, rather than the escort mission.)

Evan just hoped they'd be able to concentrate on the present, and this wouldn't turn into a SGC reunion with extensive reminiscing about the old days.

He had shit to do. So did they, even though they didn't know it yet.

"Generals, Teal'c, Doctor Jackson," Evan greeted them, ignoring the redhead. He wasn't sure how he should address the man, and he had bigger concerns at the moment, anyway. "Colonel Sheppard was planning to meet you, but we've had a SNAFU. Shawn Spencer and Corporal Spencer went missing on the mainland during routine leave, and we just discovered this today. Colonel Sheppard and Major Morris are heading up the S&R with the Deputy Prime Minister's assistance," he nodded at the redhead, who was, from what Colonel Sheppard had told Evan, here to check for proof of life. The redhead glanced at Evan briefly and went right back to staring quietly around the Control Tower.

"If you'll follow me to the Jumpers, I'll ferry you to the site and the Colonel can fill you in," Evan said, turning to lead the way to the Jumper bay.

General O'Neill protested, saying that he didn't want to be a bother (even though Evan could clearly see the avarice in his eyes at the thought of piloting a Jumper), but Evan insisted. Technically, General O'Neill and his supersized ATA-gene could pilot them no problem, and use the Jumper's connection to the other Jumpers to find the site. But there was no reason for Evan to stay on the city—she wasn't under attack and they were still all on the same planet as her (a planet surrounded by the early warning system of magical sentient spaceships). So Evan was taking them (only partly because the chatter from the site indicated that it was a freaking excavation). John had just assumed Evan would stay on the city without any good reason, orders, or even protocol keeping him here, but Evan wasn't an office drone; he just played one. So, no.

Besides, he kind of wanted to see their faces when John dropped the magic bomb and its magical-spaceship-people chaser. (Because like hell was Evan doing that without proof, and he knew that if John had been thinking straight he wouldn't have left Evan holding that firecracker. The Generals would have Evan recalled and committed before you could say 'magic is real,' despite their relevant experience with 'crazy' Doctor Jackson.)

And, Evan figured, this way he could keep the city between them and the Leviathan on the east pier, and not have to deal with someone accidentally firing on the ships, or getting distracted and stopping to talk with them (General O'Neill; Doctor Jackson and General Carter, respectively).

Both Leviathan were still on the pier, neither having joined the search and rescue effort on the mainland—Rowena had stayed to watch Jesse, and to supervise Kilgharrah's repairs, on Major Morris's request. He apparently didn't want another '[home-improvement incident](http://n1rd.tumblr.com/post/129654356542/epic-xtra),' as Major Morris had called whatever his Leviathan had tried to attempt the day prior, before the Major clammed up and refused to elaborate. Kilgharrah himself still hadn't fully repaired his thrusters, according to Major Morris, and so was stuck for the time being regardless.

Plus, if SG-1 didn't see the Leviathan, Evan wouldn't have to explain them. He wasn't positive how much Colonel Sheppard had told the SGC about them, and everything Evan knew about them would break the shiny new NDA he'd signed this morning. Because really, all he knew were that they were magic and had some special magic bond with certain wizards, and were telepathic with said wizards (though Rowena had become a regular chatterbox since she'd made herself a sound system, and would talk with any- and everyone who stopped by to shoot the shit, or who hit her up on the radio), and the NDA had been extremely explicit regarding the whole 'don't tell anyone about magic' thing.

It was an awkwardly silent flight. Luckily, it was also short.

***

"Oh, I can't even believe him! Harry is such a–" the Deputy Prime Minister broke off to hug the strange redhead, who none of SG-1 had introduced and who still hadn't introduced himself. (Or said a word since his first exclamation, actually, too busy staring at everything with wide eyes and poking at anything he could get his hands on.) "It's so good to see you!" she exclaimed. Evan left them to it—none of his business—and followed the graduates of SG-1 to the site.

Doctor Jackson was already on his knees in the dirt, exclaiming wordlessly over the circle of uncovered stones surrounding the clearing.

As much as Evan wanted to join him immediately ( _alien rocks!_ ), he made himself follow the remaining members of SG-1 over to join Colonel Sheppard and Major Morris first. Besides, Evan needed the SITREP before he'd be any use in the dirt—and he'd have to make his case to stay, so he'd have the time to play in the dirt with Doctor Jackson without getting dragged away by the scruff of his neck and ordered back to Atlantis.

Though John didn't look like he'd be doing much dragging anytime soon, by the scruff or otherwise. He was pale and looked like he was teetering on the edge of falling into shock, and leaning heavily enough on the cane he was actually using for once to push it a few inches into the ground. He didn't seem to notice their approach. If he was this out of it for the S&R of the missing long-lost brother he barely spoke to, Evan didn't want to imagine if it were Jesse instead. At least last time, John had known who to kill to get his people back.

Major Morris was hovering at John's side, supervising the activity of the men and women around them, one hand cupping the radio in his ear and a tablet in the other hand, though a significant portion of his attention seemed to be focused on making sure John didn't topple over, from the way he was eyeing him surreptitiously.

As Evan and the Generals and Teal'c approached, Major Morris acknowledged them with a nod and said into the radio, "Copy. Make another pass, just to be sure, and move onto the next section of the grid." Major Morris took his hand away from his radio and tapped something into the tablet.

A Jumper buzzed the clearing and wobbled off (a flight pattern distinct only to Doctor McKay) to hover over the forest about a mile south of them.

The clearing was a foot-deep perfect circle of bare, loosely packed dirt, undisturbed except for the familiar waffle-print tracks of SGC-issued combat boots criss-crossing it.

There was what looked like a few days old (going by the browning leaves on some of the branches composing it) simple field-expedient lean-to and a discarded rucksack just inside the edge of the forest near Doctor Jackson.

Other than that, there was no sign of either Spencer.

If Evan didn't know the basics of how stargates worked, he would have said this was the aftermath of a surprise activation—except for the way the whatever it was had obviously been buried under a foot of loam.

Buried stargates can't activate because the ring can't turn. Everyone knew that.

"Is this the 'scientific discovery' you were talking about?" General O'Neill asked Colonel Sheppard, looking around the clearing suspiciously, like he thought something was about to jump out at him, despite all the Atlantean personnel it'd have to go through to get to them here, in the eye of the S&R storm.

"No, that was the whole ma–" Colonel Sheppard started, distracted and pale (probably from the double-whammy of painkillers and his long-lost brother being MIA), but a swift elbow to the ribs from Major Morris cut him off.

The two of them both pretended nothing had happened, and General O'Neill made a face at the two of them, and visibly decided not to pursue it further.

"So, this is something else," General Carter prompted. Teal'c crossed his arms over his chest and looked stoic. Like always.

"No– I mean, yes. Shawn and Corporal Spencer are missing. They were on leave. Camping. I thought they'd just tacked a few days onto their trip, and they'd had a rough patch, and I was letting it go. I thought they'd called it in. I'm on medical leave, no one would have told me. This is as far as the Athosians tracked them when they didn't return to the village the day Corporal Spencer said they would. The trackers found this and contacted Atlantis this morning just after Atlantis's headcount revealed they were two days overdue. They would have called. Corporal Spencer's pretty OCD about check-ins," John explained, a little disjointedly. He was still staring off into the woods, his eyes narrowed as if he were looking at something he couldn't quite make out.

Teal'c immediately broke away and went to examine the lean-to and the rucksack under the trees, General Carter joined Doctor Jackson and started scraping dirt away just on the inside of the ring of stones, and General O'Neill narrowed his eyes at the ground under their boots. "Let me guess," the General said, "the Athosians said they'd been here before and this all wasn't here."

"Yes sir," Major Morris nodded sharply, taking over for John. "And they estimated it was only about three or four days old, since all this bare dirt was dry. There was a rainstorm in this area about a week ago, and Jinto said he'd been by here a few days after that, tracking one of the local game animals."

General O'Neill nodded and squinted off in the same direction Colonel Sheppard was looking. Evan squinted that way himself, but he couldn't see anything peculiar that would have caught their attention. All he could here was the faint sound of a small creek, so he dismissed it as general superior-officer-weirdness. (He'd had some experience with in that particular area.)

"If I didn't know better–" Doctor Jackson called over from the stones he was kneeling by, breaking the silence.

"You'd say it was caused by a wormhole," General O'Neill muttered along with Doctor Jackson, and the rest of them nodded. Except for Colonel Sheppard, who just got paler. Evan wondered briefly why Doctor McKay was up in a Jumper searching a grid—Evan was fairly certain McKay would be doing more good down here, anchoring John and keeping him in the moment rather than off in a head full of worst-case scenarios.

John was out of it enough right now that Evan was a little worried, but Major Morris seemed to have it in hand. Evan didn't think John had even noticed him, so he caught Major Morris's eye and raised his eyebrows at Colonel Sheppard. Morris shook his head slightly, and tilted his head toward Doctor Jackson and General Carter. Evan took the tacit permission, even though it was from his own second, and left the General and Major Morris to try and get Colonel Sheppard back in the game, since McKay wasn't there to do it.

"–the only 'gates we know that don't have glyphs are the _Destiny_ -style," General Carter was saying to Doctor Jackson when Evan joined them.

"But those still have glyphed stones as well as blank ones," Doctor Jackson replied absently, smoothing his hands over the stone he was kneeling by. "These are _all_ blank. Maybe there's only one other 'gate it can connect to, so there's no need for an address?"

"Or it's something like a ring transporter," General Carter muttered quietly to Doctor Jackson, probably so she wouldn't raise anyone's hopes just yet. "Except I haven't found a platform under all this dirt, and the ring is twice the size of a normal stargate—four times the size of a ring transporter." She sighed and sat back on her haunches, no longer leaning over the hole she'd scraped just inside the rings.

Doctor Jackson shook his head. "And it doesn't look anything like a ring transporter. It looks like a buried, blank stargate."

If the redecoration of the clearing was the result of a stargate activation, incoming or (despite the lack of DHD) outgoing, someone would have to have unburied the entire gate—not something that could be accomplished quickly or quietly enough (by any method Evan knew of) to surprise either Spencer—or this stargate's ring didn't need to turn.

But Doctor Jackson and General Carter were right—it didn't look at all like a ring transporter. It looked like a long-buried (and recently uncovered) stargate.

Evan crouched down beside them, ignoring their discussion in favor of the stones. He was a geologist, and the stargates and ring transporters (at least the ones in the Milky Way) were made of unrefined naquadah still in its silica matrix—also known as Very Special Sandstone, because Doctor Jackson was an linguist, not a scientist.

(Of _course_ Evan had taken the time to find out as much as he could about them. He was a _geologist_. He'd been a disappointed geologist when he'd learned that all the Pegasus 'gates were heavily refined naquadah, which was only as interesting to him as any other refined metal. He didn't know if the Pegasus ring transporters were made of the same material, since no one had stumbled across any in their explorations in the Pegasus galaxy. The locals didn't even have any legends about them, so the science department had hypothesized that the technology had since been refined into the elevator-like transporters found in Atlantis.)

The stones in this ring were similar in composition to the stones of the Milky Way stargates, though they weren't the same. These... They looked more like an impossible amalgam of quartzarenite and orthoquartzite than the Milky Way's plain quartzite silica matrix.

It was his fascinated and close examination of the stones themselves that led him to examine the surrounding soil, which was when he made a heartening discovery (and tallied a point in favor of General Carter's ring transporter theory).

"This is the wrong dirt," he muttered to himself.

"Yes!" Doctor Jackson exclaimed, startling Evan. Right, Jackson used to be a 'real' archaeologist before he basically founded the SGC. Evan always forgot that. "I thought I might have been mistaken, but the soil in the circle–"

"Isn't soil," Evan agreed, his excitement mounting. There was forest loam outside the 'gate stones, torn away in jagged chunks, but the interior of the 'gate was filled with a sandy composite, though it was dark enough on first glance to mimic the loam. "If the dirt inside the circle isn't local–" he started.

"Bidirectional transportation," Doctor Jackson finished Evan's thought, his brow wrinkling, and General Carter looked over at them sharply.

"If it's not a ring and not a stargate, it might be some experimental combination of the two. An attempt to combine the distance of a stargate wormhole with the bidirectionality of a matter transporter," she thought out loud. "Though I can't see any reason why they'd need to or want to combine the two when the separate applications work so well."

"When have the Ancients _not_ taken illogical experiments too far? I mean, Wraith?" Evan commented wryly, though General Carter and Doctor Jackson both ignored him.

"One thing 'gates and rings have in common—other than matter transportation—is the terminal destination being another 'gate or set of rings. But the blank stones... Maybe the Ancients were trying to develop a transporter that didn't need a terminal device, like the Asgaardian teleportation beams. They wouldn't want whatever was at their destination to be destroyed by the kerwoosh if it was an attempt to bring it somewhere else," Doctor Jackson said excitedly. "Even the Ancients wouldn't want to accidentally disintegrate themselves."

Everyone knew that anything organic that got hit by a wormhole's initial kerwoosh was reduced to its component molecules and never seen again.

It was why Colonel Sheppard was so pale and shockey, and why everyone was working around him and not trying to shoo him off or snap him out of it. No one had said anything, but they (like Evan) must have all assumed that Shawn and Corporal Spencer were history.

But if this was some sort of bastardized ring transporter, there was hope.

The Spencers still might have been eaten by a kerwoosh. But, they could have also been caught in an accidental activation of a ring transporter. Or, if the Ancients had somehow managed to develop a bidirectional wormhole, the Spencers might have decided to jump through a mystery puddle. If that were the case and it had been just Corporal Spencer, Evan would still be planning the funeral in the back of his mind.

But Evan had met Shawn. He'd gotten to know him a little. And Evan knew that if there was anyone who'd jump through a mysterious, surprise wormhole without a second thought, or explore the other end of a transporter ring activation without thinking about trying to come back, it'd be Shawn.

"A wormhole only requiring one stargate–"

"–and bidirectional ring transporters don't–"

"–could have even just forgotten to–"

"–message they are alive," General Carter, Doctor Jackson, Evan, and Teal'c all spoke at the same time, their voices overlapping. Their urgency was apparent though, even if their words were a jumbled mishmash.

Colonel Sheppard, Major Morris, and General O'Neill all swung around to stare at them. Doctor Jackson jumped to his feet, gesturing wildly as he explained–

"Traitor!" an unfamiliar voice shouted over Doctor Jackson, and Evan got to see his first ever magical duel.

It was an experience he could have done without, honestly.


	30. In which some people never forget, and rarely forgive

MORRIS

Drake wasn't stupid, or oblivious—he was busy.

He couldn't have missed the Weasley stumbling out of the Jumper in the wake of Colonel Lorne and the original SG-1. He didn't miss, either, the way Granger shot Drake a guilty look and from across the clearing as she pushed her way through the Search and Rescue teams to run across the site and greet the Weasley.

Drake knew that he didn't look anything like the Malfoy the Weasleys would remember, especially when seen from behind, with his short hair and American muggle military uniform—his own mother still occasionally needed him to point himself out in some of the pictures he'd sent her (which probably meant he should visit his mother more, actually). But that didn't mean he was going to take chances. He wasn't entirely sure which Weasley it was—they were all ginger giants (except for maybe the Weaselette, but she might have grown a few feet in the decade and a half since he'd last seen her)—though he was almost entirely sure it wasn't the Weasel himself. Regardless, none of them had any particular reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.

So even though he had the added protection of Colonel Sheppard towering over him (he knew he was short. So what), Drake positioned himself carefully so his back was to the Weasley—and now he was starting to feel like Doctor Seuss. _The Weasley, The Lorax, the Fish, and the Beagle-Beaked-Bald-Headed Grinch joined the Bumble-Tub Club and left the poor poncy Potter alone in the cold,_ he found himself thinking absently. He vowed then and there to never give any Weasley a determiner again. It was only funny until you started thinking in Seussian.

General O'Neill and Colonel Lorne joined Drake and Colonel Sheppard, and Drake breathed an internal sigh of relief as he was blocked from Weasley's view. He didn't have time for a confrontation with one of Potter's old cronies right now—he had a job to do, and Spencers to find.

His ploy to avoid drama worked. (No one who'd known him in school would have ever thought that _he_ would be trying to avoid drama, but those were the people who'd only known him before the war.)

Well, it worked for a while, until Colonel Lorne wandered over to play in the dirt and everyone in the south-eastern quadrant started shouting about how the Spencers were still alive. Drake turned to look at them when the Colonel and the General did, and Weasley turned to see what all the fuss was about, and that was that.

"Traitor!" Weasley shrieked. Drake grimaced, clutching at the dogtags under his uniform blouse, and cast the fastest Protego he could. He made sure to extend the coverage to include Colonel Sheppard and General O'Neill as well as himself. He desperately hoped Granger would be able (or willing, even) stop whatever spell Weasley had cast at the source—or that she would at least be on the lookout for ricochets.

Drake could only do so many things at once, and Weasley—the idiot—was attacking him in front of three teams of muggles who had no way of protecting themselves. Spells ricocheted in any duel, and they were all terrifyingly vulnerable.

"Get down!" Drake ordered the Atlanteans around them, who all thankfully dropped to the ground and covered their heads. He angled his Protego the best he could, hoping that any ricocheting spells would deflect up into the air.

The first one hit and did just that, though it bounced off his shield with enough ill-intent that Drake actually felt the energy drain of the shield renewing itself.

"STOP THAT!" someone boomed from overhead. Drake felt the familiar scritch on his magic of a miscast Sonorous (school Quidditch matches had often been exciting for the wrong reasons). When Drake chanced a quick glance upward, he saw McKay's Jumper hovering over the clearing. He probably hadn't even begun scanning the next square of the grid before he'd seen the commotion in the clearing.

Another spell bounced off Drake's shield, and the energy drain took him to his knees. His eyes were still aimed upwards, so he saw the Jumper almost dodge the second sizzling bolt of magic deflected at it, but it wasn't fast enough. The hex scored the side of one of the drive pods, and the Jumper immediately began wobbling, careening away from the air over Drake for an emergency landing in the woods.

What the hell was Weasley even throwing at him? Drake hadn't recognized either of the two hexes he'd used. If just one of them winging a drive pod was enough to take a Jumper out of commission– Well, Drake probably didn't have much of a chance here even if he wanted to drop the Protego and go on the offensive.

And then, of course, Drake's shield started flickering in front of him.

He ignored the Jumper—he even ignored Weasley—and focused on pouring everything he could into his shield charm. But with all the energy he'd been pouring into Kilgharrah lately, it wasn't enough. His reserves were dry, and the shield was still flickering in and out of existence. If Weasley timed his next hex right, Drake would be done for. _Ugh._ He hated to admit it, but Kilgharrah and Granger (and Carson, and Lorne, and everyone else who'd been needling him about it recently) were right: Drake had spent too much of his energy on his Leviathan. He didn't have enough left to protect himself as well as his superior officers—stretching the shield to cover all three of them just wasn't something he could sustain any longer.

With a muttered curse, Drake let the spell collapse and recast it to protect only Colonel Sheppard and General O'Neill, leaving himself defenseless. It hadn't taken any internal debate—this way, he might have a hope of holding the spell long enough for the duel to end, if Weasley took his shot quickly.

If Drake actually lived through the end of the duel, he knew at least two people were going to chew him out for pulling this stunt.

But it didn't matter. He he couldn't let them, either of them, take a hit intended for him. It wasn't just because they were his superior officers—they were good men, good commanders, men their respective galaxies needed more than they needed Drake.

Drake wasn't self-sacrificing; he was a realist.

Though he did wish he knew which Weasley was trying to kill him. All of them had always looked alike to him, with the obscene height and bright orange wild hair (granted, he'd never actually looked very hard back when he'd had the opportunity. Though he couldn't actually blame them for supporting the Cannons, considering they came pre-painted in the team's colors). Drake was pretty sure the Weaselette was shorter than even Granger, let alone him, but he hadn't seen her since she was a sixth-former, so he didn't really know.

This one could be any of them—until he swung his wand in a particularly violent movement ( _Oh, fuck, that looked like the beginning of Sectumsempra. Please, no. Not again._ ) and the flaming hair swung away from his head.

One ear. Shit, it was the living twin. Even Drake had heard about—and mourned—the death of one-half of the innovators behind the brilliant Weasley Wizarding Wheezes.

_Fuck._

He also knew that the twin publicly blamed him—well, Draco Malfoy—for his twin's death.

_Merlin blast it._

Drake closed his eyes, and waited for the Sectumsempra to hit, bracing himself for the pain. At least there were medics on site. At least the spell wouldn't ricochet now that he was unprotected. At least everyone already knew about magic.

He waited.

And waited.

He cracked open one eye.

Colonel Sheppard had managed to slip out from behind Drake's Protego without him noticing, and now he was looming over the living Weasley twin. Granger was standing between them, but she was facing down the twin, not Colonel Sheppard. It was an eerily silent standoff.

Drake opened his other eye, astonished.

At least Colonel Sheppard seemed to have gotten his color back, even if he was foolishly risking it for Drake, of all people.

Doctor Jackson walked slowly over to the detente, his hands raised in the ubiquitous 'I'm not going to hurt you' gesture while he slickly wrapped a wandless, wordless Protego around Weasley—anything he cast would now just reflect back in on him.

So that was that sorted then.

And apparently Jackson was a wizard, one smooth enough to hide his power (and it must be huge, to be able to manage that trick he'd just pulled on Weasley) from other wizards—from even Drake, and Drake had known Jackson for years before he'd transferred to Pegasus.

"He killed my brother!" the living twin shouted. Drake flinched.

"Oh, he did not, George!" Hermione shouted back, flinging her arms out wildly for emphasis.

Drake hadn't. He hadn't fought in the Battle of Hogwarts at all, actually. He'd stayed at the back—under a glamour suggested by McGonagall, since most of the Hogwarts defenders didn't know that he was actually on their side—helping the wounded. But he could see Weasley's point.

Drake had left the country quietly and without fanfare after the Wizengamot pardoned him for being a Death Eater, the favor the Order had promised him in return for spying for the Order. That part of it had likely not been publicised along with the 'Legacy Death Eater escapes trial without punishment!' headlines he'd seen plastered all over the _Daily Prophet_ before he'd left England. Why, after all, would the _Prophet_ want to report the truth and swing the public's opinion Drake's way when they could instead use him as a boogieman to increase readership? It's why he'd never trusted what he read in the paper, not even when his father had owned the editor. (Perhaps _because_ his father had owned the editor.)

But naive little Draco Malfoy had joined the Dark Lord with no ulterior motives other than pleasing his father, when the war had begun in earnest.

Sometimes Drake didn't think the Wizengamot _should_ have pardoned him, but he tried to ignore the guilt the best he could and just get on with his life. Revenge and atonement through better living, and all that. It had even worked, mostly. He was a different man now than he'd been then. But he knew that not many other people would be able, or willing, to see that—which was why he hadn't returned to England since he'd left, and tried to stay out of Europe as best he could (at the very least, out of Europe's wizarding cities, since he hadn't really had a choice when he'd been stationed in Germany and Italy on his way to and from the Middle East).

"He wasn't even a real Death Eater, George! He was spying on them for the Order!" Hermione shouted, her hair frizzing with anger and riled-up magic.

"Don't lie for him, 'Mione," Weasley growled.

"Don't lie for me, Hermione," Drake said quietly, in concert with Weasley. They met each other's eyes over Granger's head. Colonel Sheppard had stepped off to the side with Doctor Jackson, and they were both watching intently, though neither of them had said anything yet. Drake ignored them.

"I didn't kill your brother. I didn't kill anyone, actually," _Vince,_ his conscience wailed, but Drake forced it quiet for now. Not even Potter had counted Vince against Drake back then, but Drake's guilt rarely listened to logic. "But I was a Death Eater for real, for a while, at the beginning. That was _seventeen years_ ago, though." He wasn't trying to shake the blame, he _had_ been a Death Eater—but if he was going to be murdered in revenge, he'd prefer if it were for something he'd _actually done_.

"And I destroyed five-sixths of a solar system with my hubris," McKay said loudly, striding into the middle of the detente, startling everyone.

Drake had been a little preoccupied at the time, so he hadn't noticed how the Jumper's emergency landing had gone. However, since McKay hadn't led with that, Drake assumed everyone had walked away from it.

"So are we blaming people, or are we working?" McKay demanded, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring indiscriminately around. "I don't know about you, strangely-dressed person, but I've got work to do. People are missing and we're trying to find them, so if you don't mind, can you take this magic show of yours somewhere else? You're fucking up my readings."

"'Mione's right here," Weasley said, apparently startled out of his rage.

"I'm not the one missing, George," Granger said, rolling her eyes. "The Colonel's brother and brother-in-law were camping here," she waved around her at the depression, "and disappeared. We're trying to find them."

"Actually," Doctor Jackson finally spoke up, "we have a theory about that."

Weasley eyed Jackson narrowly for a moment, then relaxed. "Oh, you're that leaver who was on about the aliens in Egypt a couple of decades ago, yeah? The family went and saw one of your speeches when we were on holiday 'round there."

Jackson raised his eyebrows. "I do vaguely remember some redheads heckling me, yes."

Weasley shrugged. "Our bad. You obviously proved us all, yeah? Fred woulda been chuffed to see all this," he looked around, his eyes sad. Drake looked away, not wanting to be an audience to someone's private grief—so he didn't see whatever it was Weasley saw that prompted him to ask, "Does that holographic spy-cam sort of thing over there have anything to do with your theory, then?"

Weasley wandered off into the woods in the direction Colonel Sheppard and General O'Neill had been staring stoically while Drake had assumed they were doing some sort of silent-bonding-ritual thing earlier. Drake wished he had a time-turner and could go back and slap his past self upside the head for not taking their preoccupation with that area of the woods seriously.

"Me'n Danger've been working on something of the sort—this one's a brilliant example of what we been trying to get our prototype to do," Weasley said absentmindedly, circling what looked like a rock in the middle of a thicket of trees.

"Danger... Beckett?" Granger asked quietly, amused about something, but Drake barely heard her. He followed Weasley into the woods, trailing after Colonel Sheppard, General O'Neill, and pretty much everyone else within hearing range. The sudden insight into the Spencers' disappearance overrode his very reasonable caution of the man who'd just been trying to dismember him, and Drake crowded up next to Weasley when he got to the ancient-looking (but not _Ancient_ -looking) stone pedestal.

There were some softly-glimmering motes of light hovering over the pedestal, but they didn't appear to be more than some sort of a decorative lamp. _This_ was what Weasley had been trying to make? The WWW product line had certainly gone downhill since the last catalog Drake had flipped through.

"Is that a ship? An old-timey pirate ship?" General O'Neill asked incredulously. All Drake could see were the motes of light, but if he squinted, he guessed they almost resembled a tall ship—like the one the Durmstrang Institute had sailed up from the lake during his fourth year—except for how much smaller and shabbier it was.

"Thank fuck, it's not just me," Colonel Sheppard breathed, slumping dramatically. Thank Merlin that Drake realized the sudden release of tension was from relief rather than exhaustion or shock before he leapt to catch his commanding officer's toppling body—though not before Drake had tensed to spring for Sheppard, something Weasley must have noticed, if the coolly amused glance he flashed Drake meant anything.

(Not that Weasley really had any ground to stand on when it came to laughing at anyone right now. Let alone the whole unprovoked attack; after living as a muggle for fifteen years, Drake finally understood the incredulity most of the muggle-borns at school had expressed for Wizarding-kind's robe-centric fashions. Surrounded by muggle military uniforms—even Granger was in one now, though Drake didn't want to ask how or why—Weasley looked quite the eccentric.)

"It's definitely a ship," Weasley confirmed, back to ignoring Drake again. Drake was content with this unspoken truce, since it was all he'd likely be getting from Weasley. He didn't expect them to ever become best friends, though a moratorium on the death threats would be nice.

"I don't see anything," Granger said, annoyed.

A few others expressed the same sentiment, though not, Drake noticed, Jackson. He stayed remarkably tight-lipped during the discussion, but from the way he was focusing on the area above the pedestal—where Drake could see the dancing motes of light—Drake suspected that Jackson was hiding more secrets than just wizardry.

The people who could see it clearest were Weasley, Colonel Sheppard, and General O'Neill. Drake and McKay (and, Drake suspected, Jackson) could see the clearly defined motes of light, but no real image. The few S&R personnel with the artificial ATA gene who'd followed them all over to the pedestal could see a faint glimmer in the air over the stone if they concentrated, but nothing more. General Carter and Teal'c saw just as much empty air as Granger had complained about.

A quick test McKay performed with the Life Signs Detector he plucked out of Colonel Sheppard's tac vest pocket (essentially just telling Weasley to hold it and think _on_ at it, and then struggling to retrieve it from the fascinated Weasley) proved that, of _course_ , Weasley had the ATA gene, though not how strong it was.

_Great—that one's likely here to stay, then,_ Drake thought to himself, momentarily wishing Kilgharrah was close enough for him to bitch at. It seemed, though, that a half-planet away was further than their impressive range could stretch.

It seemed that both magical potential as well as the ATA gene were required for the pedestal to be anything more than a pretty light show. No one, however, even mentioned the possibility of bringing Jesse out for a look at the thing. They were all smart enough to know he needed to stay safe with Rowena back on the city, and not _anywhere_ near the unburied stone ring with a habit of mysteriously disappearing people.

"So is this teleportation, time travel, or alternate dimensions we're looking at here?" General O'Neill finally asked. Granger cleared her throat and raised her hand.

Drake closed his eyes. _Merlin help us, this isn't school, Granger,_ he aimed the thought at her, but she didn't acknowledge him. Still didn't have telepathic abilities with anyone but Kilgharrah and Atlantis, then. _Probably a good thing,_ he had to admit.

"Yes, small frizzy lady," General O'Neill called on her, amused.

"My theory is that the Ancients had come across... _something_ from an alternate dimension," Granger looked at Colonel Sheppard pleadingly, but Sheppard just closed his eyes rather than meet her puppy-dog gaze. "And their experiments failed to replicate that _something_ , no matter how hard they tried. They ended up with the Wraith instead. So, I think it's possible that perhaps they went looking for the source of the _something_ –" She broke off, looking like she was visibly restraining herself from stomping her foot and throwing a wobbly. "Colonel, this will all be much easier if you would just read the General in on it like you said you would," she said, scowling.

"You think mages are from an alternate dimension?" Jackson asked curiously.

_Well, apparently the General already knows, then,_ Drake thought, bemused by General O'Neill's lack of reaction to the allusion of magic.

"And the Leviathan," Granger said eagerly. "They have a sort of symbiotic relationship with wizards; it's _fascinating_."

After a not-so-brief tangent into the known history of the Leviathan, and their current presence on Atlantis and circling the planet, General O'Neill cleared his throat meaningfully. Jackson fixed General O'Neill with a set of puppy-dog eyes that were more effective than Granger's. Drake kind of wanted to immediately search out a baby Leviathan for Jackson to play with—Drake didn't even know if there _were_ baby Leviathan—and the pleading look hadn't even been directed at him.

General O'Neill rolled his eyes. "When you retire. Not before. We need you on Earth," he ordered, clearly immune to the look, likely from repeated exposure.

"Can we get back on topic, please," Colonel Sheppard asked tightly. His shoulders were drawn in tight and he was staring intently at the image over the pedestal. "Shawn and Corporal Spencer are still missing."

"Well, they're not here," Weasley said, also engrossed in whatever he could see over the pedestal. "But I'm pretty sure they're there, if they've got the pocket trousers like the rest of you muggles. Does one of them has hair like yours, and the other one's shorter and is normally really violently narked-off about things?" he asked John slowly.

***

It turned out that the pedestal thing—and Drake was pretty hacked off that he couldn't see what was going on in it—was some sort of recording device that had locked onto the dimensional (they assumed. They hoped) travelers. And it was unique to itself in that it operated on a statistically-unlikely combination of magical-potential and the ATA gene, considering that the Wraith were the Ancients' attempt to induce magic in themselves—probably without the help of the Leviathan, considering how the Boss 'Viathan been able to fix McKay up.

It could also fast forward.

They were working their way up to the present day, because the Spencers had apparently been missing for longer than anyone suspected. The viewing committee was already up to the fourth day of surveillance (though no one wanted to waste time comparing relative day-lengths, and so no one knew whether the days wherever the Spencers had landed were any different to this planet's days), when Drake realized McKay—who'd surely be halfway to figuring it out with some complex formula that took the fast forwarding into effect—was no longer in the group surrounding the pedestal, or hovering at Colonel Sheppard's side. Where had he gotten to?

Drake spared a moment to hope feverishly that McKay hadn't gotten sucked through the dimensional portal too—Drake didn't think he or Colonel Lorne would be able to cope with that level of catatonia in Colonel Sheppard.

But, no. McKay was over by the Jumper, thank Merlin.

Drake made a mental note to pull him aside later and find out whether the good doctor had intentionally interfaced a Sonorous with the Jumper's crowd-control speakers. He rather thought not, which was a sign McKay needed to join Jesse in his fast-tracked how-to-be-magic courses sooner rather than later.

Drake drifted away from the pedestal, heading back to the milling group of Atlantean S&R personnel.

He couldn't see what was going on in the pedestal, and didn't have any fancy inventor-researcher-scientist babble to contribute, so he really wasn't needed in the conclave hovering around it. However, he was still nominally in charge of this shitshow. It needed to be packed up and sent home, since they now knew the Spencers weren't lost and injured and waiting for rescue—at least, not in this dimension.

***

Jackson sidled up next to Drake while he was looking over the list of equipment his people had initially packed out to the site. "Doctor Jackson," Drake acknowledged him warily, feeling trouble brewing on his horizon like it was a storm front.

"So, the lovely Miss Granger says the Atlantis Expedition will want to start importing wizards soon, since the Statute is in smithereens after the Leviathan arrived," Jackson began leadingly.

"Not only the Leviathans," Drake muttered, mostly to himself, and shook off Jackson's inquiring look. "I'm fairly certain that General O'Neill would have me court-martialed if you managed to somehow forget to 'gate back to Earth, even if I had nothing to do with it," Drake said dryly.

Jackson shook his head, shooting a fond-but-annoyed look over toward the conclave still huddling over the pedestal. "No, I'm not talking about me—though I'll be here the day right after I retire, you can bet on that—but about some mages I know of back on base. A majority of them are attached to one of our lesser-known programs; I think you know the one I'm thinking of. We could expand it, shuffle the rest of them into it, and then conveniently no longer have room for it at the SGC. Atlantis, however, has acres of free labs and buildings just waiting to be explored."

"Plus, it'll lessen the the likelihood of the tech leaking to the criminal underground?" Drake commented wryly, staring blankly at the tablet in his hand. "Yeah, I see where you're going with this. You'll have to go to Colonel Sheppard with it, of course."

"Maybe we'll even lure back a few of its prodigal sons," General O'Neill commented, suddenly right next to Jackson. Damn, the General sure moved fucking quietly—not even 'especially for an old guy,' just overall.

"Mmhmm," Drake hummed noncommittally. He could hazard a guess as to whom the General was referring, and he doubted it would be as easy as all that.

"And there's a new superstar in the program for you to show up," Jackson baited Drake. They'd worked together a lot on the project, back in its early days, and knew each other fairly well because of it. Meaning that Jackson knew exactly which of Drake's buttons he needed to push to get Drake on board, which was extremely annoying.

"Little Navy pipsqueak—well, not little and not a pipsqueak, but we got him about a year and a half ago when he was barely seventeen—who ran through all the scenarios you left us with and then improved on them. And that was in just the first few months we had him," the General said. Drake's interest had already been piqued, of course, but now he let it show. His eyebrows drifted up in question, but neither the General nor Jackson expanded on anything they'd already told him.

"Yeah, fine," Drake capitulated finally, then remembered who he was talking to. "Sir, sorry sir. I'll put in a good word with the Colonel."

"Ah, yes. Actually, it's not the Colonel we're trying to tempt here," Jackson hedged. "As smart as the kid is, we can't really put a teenager in charge of the project and have the government keep taking it seriously. It's hard enough as it is to get funding for it."

Drake stopped staring at his tablet to look at them incredulously. "You want me to take over the program," he restated flatly. "I've kinda got a full load here already, sir," he gestured speakingly around the dimensional-portal-transporter-ring cavity, at the S&R teams still packing up the Jumpers wedged into the trees (no one was spending much more time than they needed to inside the ring's depression).

Watching his people avoid the depression, Drake suddenly reconsidered his middle-of-the-action placement as possibly unwise. He moved to the outside edge of the stones, Jackson and the General following him like two very intent (very tall) ducklings.

"Technically, you never relinquished control of the program after you inherited it," the General admitted. Drake took 'inherited' to mean 'kept everything from falling to shit after half the program leads absconded with valuable tech and formulae.'

"Probably because I was never formally given project control and therefore couldn't formally relinquish it, sir," Drake said dryly, beginning to see the humor in the bureaucracy of it all.

Jackson shrugged. "Regardless, do you want it? Because you've got it already, and we're really just sending along everything you forgot to pack when your transfer went through," he grinned mischievously.

Drake thought about it for a moment, keeping in mind his current workload. "If the new kid is as good at paperwork as he is at everything else, I won't even complain," Drake eventually agreed, sighing. It wasn't like he really had a choice, after all—Atlantis and her new Leviathan friends needed the wizards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, _that_ program.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Jesse's cheat sheet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4704041) by [neensz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neensz/pseuds/neensz)




End file.
